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COMPLETE WORKS OF JAMES RUSSELL 
LOWELL. New Riverside Edition. In same 
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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, 
Boston and Newt York. 



THE 



OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 



BY 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1892 






Copyright, 1892, 
By CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H, O. Houghton & Co. 



NOTE 

In tlie spring of 1887, Mr. Lowell read, at the 
Lowell Institute in Boston, six lectures on the Old 
English Dramatists. They had been rapidly writ- 
ten, and in their delivery much was said extempo- 
raneously, suggested by the passages from the plays 
selected for illustration of the discourse. To many 
of these passages there was no reference in the 
manuscript ; they were read from the printed book. 
The lectures were never revised by Mr. Lowell for 
publication, but they contain such admirable and 
interesting criticism, and are in themselves such 
genuine pieces of good literature, that it has seemed 
to me that they should be given to the public.^ 

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 

^ Before their publication in this volume, these Lectures ap- 
peared in Harper^s Magazine, in the numbers from June to No- 
vember, 1892. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Introductory , . 1 

II. Marlowe 28 

III. Webster 55 

IV. Chapman 78 

V. Beaumont and Fletcher 100 

VI. Massinqer and Ford 113 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 



INTRODUCTORY 

When the rule limiting speeches to an hour was 
adopted by Congress, which was before most of 
you were born, an eminent but somewhat discur- 
sive person spent more than that measure of time 
in convincing me that whoever really had anything 
to say could say it in less. I then and there ac- 
quired a conviction of this truth, which has only 
strengthened with years. Yet whoever undertakes 
to lecture must adapt his discourse to the law which 
requires such exercises to be precisely sixty minutes 
long, just as a certain standard of inches must be 
reached by one who would enter the army. If one 
has been studying all his life how to be terse, how 
to suggest rather than to expound, how to contract 
rather than to dilate, something like a strain, is put 
upon the conscience by this necessity of giving the 
full measure of words, without reference to other 
considerations which a judicious ear may esteem of 
more importance. Instead of saying things com- 
pactly and pithily, so that they may be easily car- 
ried away, one is tempted into a certain generosity 
and circumambience of phrase, which, if not adapted 



2 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

to conquer Time, may at least com2:)el liim to turn 
his glass and admit a drawn game. It is so much 
harder to fill an hour than to empty one ! 

These thoughts rose before me with painful viv- 
idness as I fancied myself standing here again, after 
an interval of thirty-two years, to address an audi- 
ence at the Lowell Institute. Then I lectured, not 
without some favorable acceptance, on Poetry in 
general and what constituted it, on Imagination 
and Fancy, on Wit and Humor, on Metrical Ro- 
mances, on Ballads, and I know not what else — 
on whatever I thought I had anything to say about, 
I suppose. Then I was at the period in life when 
thoughts rose in coveys, and one filled one's bag 
without considering too nicely whether the game 
had been hatched within his neighbor's fence or 
within his own, — a period of life when it does n't 
seem as if everything had been said ; when a man 
overestimates the value of what specially interests 
himself, and insists with Don Quixote that aU 
the world shall stop till the superior charms of his 
Dulcinea of the moment have been acknowledged ; 
when he conceives himself a missionary, and is per- 
suaded that he is saving his fellows from the perdi- 
tion of their souls if he convert them from belief in 
some aesthetic heresy. That is the mood of mind 
in which one may read lectures with some assurance 
of success. I remember how I read mine over 
to the clock, that I might be sure I had enough, 
^ and how patiently the clock listened, and gave no 
opinion except as to duration, on which point it 
assured me that I always ran over. This is the 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 3 

pleasant peril of entliusiasm, wliicli lias always 
something of the careless superfluity of youth. 
Since then, and for a period making a sixth part 
of my mature life, my mind has been shunted off 
upon the track of other duties and other interests. 
If I have learned something, I have also forgotten 
a good deal. One is apt to forget so much in the 
service of one's country, — even that he is an 
American, I have been told, though I can hardly 
believe it. 

When I selected my topic for this new venture, 
I was returning to a first love. The second volume 
I ever printed, in 1843, I think it was, — it is now 
a rare book, I am not sorry to know ; I have not 
seen it for many years, — was mainly about the 
Old English Dramatists, if I am not mistaken. I 
dare say it was crude enough, but it was sponta- 
neous and honest. I have continued to read them 
ever since, with no less pleasure, if with more dis- 
crimination. But when I was confronted with the 
question what I could say of them that would in- 
terest any rational person, after all that had been 
said by Lamb, the most sympathetic of critics, 
by Hazlitt, one of the most penetrative, by Cole- 
ridge, the most intuitive, and by so many others, 
I was inclined to believe that instead of an easy 
subject I had chosen a subject very far from easy. 
But I sustained myself with the words of the 
great poet who so often has saved me from my- 
self:— 

" Vagliami il lung"o studio e il grande amore, 
Che m' ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume." 



4 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

If I bring no other qualification, I bring at least 
that of hearty affection, which is the first condition 
of insight. I shall not scruple to repeat what may 
seem already too familiar, confident that these old 
poets will stand as much talking about as most peo- 
ple. At the risk of being tedious, I shall put you 
back to your scales as a teacher of music does his 
pupils. For it is the business of a lecturer to treat 
his audience as M. Jourdain wished to be treated 
in respect of the Latin language, — to take it for 
granted that they know, but to talk to them as if 
they did n't. I should have preferred to entitle my 
course Readings from the Old English Dramatists 
with illustrative comments, rather than a critical 
discussion of them, for there is more conviction in 
what is beautiful in itself than in any amount of 
explanation why, or exposition of how, it is beauti- 
ful. A rose has a very succinct way of explaining 
itself. When I find nothing profitable to say, I 
shall take sanctuary in my authors. 

It is generally assumed that the Modern Drama 
in France, Spain, Italy, and England was an evo- 
lution out of the Mysteries and Moralities and In^ 
terludes which had edified and amused preceding 
generations of simpler taste and ruder intelligence. 
'T is the old story of Thespis and his cart. Taken 
with due limitations, and substituting the word 
stage for drama^ this theory of origin is satisfactory 
enough. The stage was there, and the desire to be 
amused, when the drama at last appeared to occupy 
the one and to satisfy the other. It seems to have 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 5 

been, so far as the English Drama is concerned, 
a case of post hoc^ without altogether adequate 
grounds for inferring 2b propter hoc. The Interludes 
may have served as training-schools for actors. It 
is certain that Richard Burbage, afterwards of 
Shakespeare's company, was so trained. He is the 
actor, you wiU remember, who first played the part 
of Hamlet, and the untimely expansion of whose 
person is supposed to account for the Queen's 
speech in the fencing scene, " He 's fat and scant 
of breath." I may say, in passing, that the phrase 
merely means " He 's out of training," as we should 
say now. A fat Hamlet is as inconceivable as a 
lean Falstaff. Shakespeare, with his usual discre- 
tion, never makes the Queen hateful, and made 
use of this expedient to show her solicitude for 
her son. Her last word, as she is dying, is his 
name. 

To return. The Interlude may have kept alive 
the traditions of a stage, and may have made ready 
a certain number of persons to assume higher and 
graver parts when the opportunity should come; 
but the revival of learning, and the rise of cities 
capable of supplying a more cultivated and exact- 
ing audience, must have had a stronger and more 
direct influence on the growth of the Drama, as we 
understand the word, than any or all other influ- 
ences combined. Certainly this seems to me true 
of the English Drama at least. The English Mir- 
acle Plays are dull beyond what is permitted even 
by the most hardened charity, and there is nothing 
dramatic in them except that they are in the form of 



6 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

dialogue. The Interludes are perhaps further sad- 
dened in the reading by reminding us how much 
easier it was to be amused three hundred years ago 
than now, but their wit is the wit of the Eocene 
period, unhappily as long as it is broad, and their 
humor is horse-play. We inherited a vast accumu- 
lation of barbarism from our Teutonic ancestors. 
It was only on those terms, perhaps, that we could 
have their vigor too. The Interludes have some 
small value as illustrating manners and forms of 
speech, but the man must be born expressly for 
the purpose — as for some of the adventures of 
mediaeval knight-errantry — who can read them. 
" Gammer Gurton's Needle " is perhaps as good as 
any. It was acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, 
in 1566, and is remarkable, as Mr. Collier pointed 
out, as the first existing play acted before either 
University. Its author was John Still, afterwards 
Bishop of Bath and Wells, and it is curious that 
when Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge he should have 
protested against the actmg before the University 
of an English play so unbefitting its learning, dig- 
nity, and character. " Gammer Gurton's Needle " 
contains a very jolly and spirited song in praise of 
ale. Latin plays were acted before the Universities 
on great occasions, but there was nothing dramatic 
about them but their form. One of them by Bur- 
ton, author of the " Anatomy of Melancholy," has 
been printed, and is not without merit. In the 
" Pardoner and the Frere " there is a hint at the 
drollery of those cross-readings with which Bonnell 
Thornton made our grandfathers laugh : — 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 7 

" Pard. Pope July the Sixth hath granted fair and well — 

Fr, That when to them God hath abundance sent — 

Pard. And doth twelve thousand years of pardon to them send — 

Fr. They would distribute none to the indigent — 

Pard. That aught to this holy chapel lend.' ' 

Everything in these old farces is rudimentary. 
They are not merely coarse ; they are vulgar. 

In France it was better, but France had some- 
thing which may fairly be called literature before 
any other country in Europe, not literature in the 
highest sense, of course, but something, at any 
rate, that may be still read with pleasure for its 
delicate beauty, like " Aucassin and Nicolete," or 
for its downright vigor, like the " Song of Eoland," 
or for its genuine humor, like " Renard the Fox." 
There is even one French Miracle Play of the thir- 
teenth century, by the trouvere Rutebeuf , based on 
the legend of Theophilus of Antioch, which might 
be said to contain the germ of Calderon's " El Ma- 
gico Prodigioso," and thus, remotely, of Goethe's 
" Faust." Of the next century is the farce of " Pate- 
lin," which has given a new word with its several 
derivatives to the French language, and a prover- 
bial phrase, revenons a nos moutons^ that long ago 
domiciled itself beyond the boundaries of France. 
" Patelin " rises at times above the level of farce, 
though hardly to the region of pure comedy. I saw 
it acted at the Theatre Franijais many years ago, 
with only so much modernization of language as 
was necessary to make it easily comprehensible, 
and found it far more than archaeologically enter- 
taining. Surely none of our old English Interludes 



8 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

could be put upon the stage now without the 
gloomiest results. They were not, in my judgment, 
the direct, and hardly even the collateral, ancestors 
of our legitimate comedy. On the other hand, 
while the Miracle Plays left no traces of themselves 
in our serious drama, the play of Punch and Judy 
looks very like an impoverished descendant of 
theirs. 

In Spain it was otherwise. There the old Mo- 
ralities and Mysteries of the Church Festivals are 
renewed and perpetuated in the Autos Sacramen- 
tales of Calderon, but ensouled with the creative 
breath of his genius, and having a strange phan- 
tasmal reality in the ideal world of his wonder- 
working imagination. One of his plays, " La Devo- 
cion de la Cruz," an Auto in spirit if not in form, 
dramatizes, as only he could do it, the doctrine of 
justification by faith. In Spain, too, the comedy 
of the booth and the plaza is plainly the rude 
sketch of the higher creations of Tirso and Lope 
and Calderon and Rojas and Alarcon, and scores 
of others only less than they. The tragicomedy of 
" Celestina," written at the close of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, is the first modern piece of realism or natural- 
ism, as it is called, with which I am acquainted. It 
is coarse, and most of the characters are low, but 
there are touches of nature in it, and the character 
of Celestina is brought out with singular vivacity. 
The word tragicomedy is many years older than 
this play, if play that may be called which is but a 
succession of dialogues, but I can think of no ear- 
lier example of its application to a production in 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 9 

dramatic form than by the Bachelor Fernando de 
Rojas in tliis instance. It was made over into 
English, rather than translated, in 1520, — our 
first literary debt to Spain, I should guess. The 
Spanish theatre, though the influence of Seneca is 
apparent in the form it put on, is more sincerely a 
growth of the soil than any other of modern times, 
and it has one interesting analogy with our own in 
the introduction of the clown into tragedy, whether 
by way of foil or parody. The Spanish dramatists 
have been called marvels of fecundity, but the fa- 
cility of their trochaic measure, in which the verses 
seem to go of themselves, makes their feats less 
wonderful. The marvel would seem to be rather 
that, writing so easily, they also wrote so well. 
Their invention is as remarkable as their abun- 
dance. Their drama and our own have affected 
the spirit and sometimes the substance of later 
literature more than any other. They have to a 
certain extent impregnated it. I have called the 
Spanish theatre a product of the soil, yet it must 
not be overlooked that Sophocles, Euripides, Plau- 
tus, and Terence had been translated into Spanish 
early in the sixteenth century, and that Lope de 
Rueda, its real founder, would willingly have fol- 
lowed classical models more closely had the public 
taste justified him in doing so. But fortunately 
the national genius triumphed over traditional cri- 
terions of art, and the Spanish theatre, asserting its 
own happier instincts, became and continued Span- 
ish, with an unspeakable charm and flavor of its 
own. 



10 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

One peculiarity of the Spanish plays makes it 
safe to recommend them even virginibus puerisque^ 
— they are never unclean. Even Milton would 
have approved a censorship of the press that ac- 
complished this. It is a remarkable example of 
how sharp the contradiction is between the private 
morals of a people and their public code of moral- 
ity. Certain things may be done, but they must 
not seem to be done. 

I have said nothing of the earlier Italian Drama 
because it has failed to interest me. But Italy had 
indirectly a potent influence, through Spenser, in 
suppling English verse till it could answer the 
higher uses of the stage. The lines — for they can 
hardly be caUed verses — of the first attempts at 
regular plays are as uniform, flat, and void of va- 
riety as laths cut by machinery, and show only the 
arithmetical ability of their fashioners to count as 
high as ten. A speech is a series of such laths laid 
parallel to each other with scrupulous exactness. 
But I shall have occasion to return to this topic in 
speaking of Marlowe. 

Who, then, were the Old English Dramatists ? 
They were a score or so of literary bohemians, for 
the most part, living from hand to mouth in Lon- 
don during the last twenty years of the sixteenth 
century and the first thirty years of the seventeenth, 
of the personal history of most of whom we fortu- 
nately know little, and who, by their good luck in 
being born into an unsophisticated age, have writ- 
ten a few things so well that they seem to have 
written themselves. Poor, nearly all of them. 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 11 

tliey have left us a fine estate in the realm of Faery. 
Among them were three or four men of genius. A 
comrade of theirs by his calling, but set apart from 
them alike by the splendor of his endowments and 
the more equable balance of his temperament, was 
that divine apparition known to mortals as Shake- 
speare. The civil war put an end to their activity. 
The last of them, in the direct line, was James 
Shirley, remembered chiefly for two lines from the 
last stanza of a song of his in " The Contention of 
Ajax and Ulysses," which have become a proverb : — 

" Only the actions of the just 
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." 

It is a nobly simple piece of verse, with the slow 
and solemn cadence of a funeral march. The hint 
of it seems to have been taken from a passage in 
that droningly dreary book the " Mirror for Magis- 
trates." This little poem is one of the best in- 
stances of the good fortune of the men of that age 
in the unconscious simplicity and gladness (I know 
not what else to call it) of their vocabulary. The 
language, so to speak, had just learned to go alone, 
and found a joy in its own mere motion, which it 
lost as it grew older, and to walk was no longer a 
marvel. 

Nothing in the history of literature seems more 
startling than the sudden spring with which Eng- 
lish poetry blossomed in the later years of Eliza- 
beth's reign. We may account for the seemingly 
unheralded apparition of a single genius like Dante 
or Chaucer by the genius itself ; for, given that, 



12 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

everything else is possible. But even in such cases 
as these much must have gone before to make the 
genius available when it came. For the production 
of great literature there must be already a language 
ductile to all the varying moods of expression. 
There must be a certain amount of cidture, or the 
stimidus of sympathy would be wanting. If, as 
Horace tells us, the heroes who lived before Aga- 
memnon have perished for want of a poet to cele- 
brate them, so doubtless many poets have gone 
dumb to their graves, or, at any rate, have uttered 
themselves imperfectly, for lack of a fitting vehicle 
or of an amiable atmosphere. Genius, to be sure, 
makes its own opportunity, but the circumstances 
must be there out of which it can be made. For 
instance, I cannot help feeling that Turold, or who- 
ever was the author of the " Chanson de Roland," 
was endowed with a rare epical faculty, and that he 
would have given more emphatic proof of it had it 
been possible for him to clothe his thought in a 
form equivalent to the vigor of his conception. 
Perhaps with more art, he might have had less of 
that happy audacity of the first leap which Mon- 
taigne valued so higlily, but would he not have 
gained could he have spoken to us in a verse as 
sonorous as the Greek hexameter, nay, even as 
sweet in its cadences, as variously voluble by its 
slurs and elisions, and withal as sharply edged and 
clean cut as the Italian pentameter ? It is at least 
a question open to debate. Mr. Matthew Arnold 
taxes the " Song of Roland " with an entire want of 
the grand style ; and this is true enough ; but it 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 13 

has immense stores of courage and victory in it, as 
Taillef er proved at the battle of Hastings, — yes, 
and touches of heroic pathos, too. 

Many things had slowly and silently concurred 
to make that singular pre-eminence of the Eliza- 
bethan literature possible. First of all was the 
growth of a national consciousness, made aware of 
itself and more cumulatively operative by the exist- 
ence and safer accessibility of a national capital, to 
serve it both as head and heart. The want of such 
a focus of intellectual, political, and material activ- 
ity has had more to do with the backwardness and 
provincialism of our own literature than is gener- 
ally taken into account. My friend Mr. Hosea 
Biglow ventured to affirm twenty odd years ago 
that we had at last arrived at this national con- 
sciousness through the convulsion of our civil war, — 
a convulsion so violent as might w^ell convince the 
members that they formed part of a common body. 
But I make bold to doubt whether that conscious- 
ness will ever be more than fitful and imperfect, 
whether it will ever, except in some moment of su- 
preme crisis, pour itself into and reenforce the 
individual consciousness in a way to make our lit- 
erature feel itself of age and its own master, till we 
shall have got a common head as well as a common 
body. It is not the size of a city that gives it this 
stimulating and expanding quality, but the fact 
that it sums up in itself and gathers all the moral 
and intellectual forces of the country in a single 
focus. London is still the metropolis of the Brit- 
ish as Paris of the French race. We admit this 



14 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

readily enough as regards Australia or Canada, but 
we willingly overlook it as regards ourselves. Wash- 
ington is growing more national and more habita- 
ble every year, but it will never be a capital till 
every kind of culture is attainable there on as good 
terms as elsewhere. Why not on better than else- 
where ? We are rich enough. Bismarck's first care 
has been the Museums of Berlin. For a fiftieth part 
of the money Congress seems willing to waste in 
demoralizing the country, we might have had the 
Hamilton books and the far more precious Ash- 
burnham manuscripts. Perhaps what formerly 
gave Boston its admitted literary supremacy was 
the fact that fifty years ago it was more truly a 
capital than any other American city. Edinburgh 
once held a similar position, with similar results. 
And yet how narrow Boston was ! How scant a 
pasture it offered to the imagination ! I have often 
mused on the dreary fate of the great painter wha 
perished slowly of inanition over yonder in Cam- 
bridgeport, he who had known Coleridge and Lamb 
and Wordsworth, and who, if ever any, 

" With immortal wine 
Should have been bathed and swum in more heart's ease 
Than there are waters in the Sestian seas." 

The pity of it ! That unfinished Belshazzar of his 
was a bitter sarcasm on our self-conceit. Among 
us, it was unfinishable. Whatever place can draw 
together the greatest, amount and greatest variety 
of intellect and character, the most abundant 
elements of civilization, performs the best function 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 15 

of a university. London was such a centre in the 
days of Queen Elizabeth. And think what a 
school the Mermaid Tavern must have been ! The 
verses which Beaumont addressed to Ben Jonson 
from the country point to this : — 

" What things have we seen 
Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been 
So nimble and so full of subtle flame 
As if that every one from whence they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life ; then when there hath been thrown 
Wit able enough to justify the town 
For three days past, wit that might warrant be 
For the whole city to talk foolishly 
Till that were cancelled ; and, when that was gone, 
We left an air behind us which alone 
Was able to make the two next companies 
Right witty ; though but downright fools, more wise." 

This air, which Beaumont says they left behind 
them, they carried with them, too. It was the at- 
mosphere of culture, the open air of it, which loses 
much of its bracing and stimulating virtue in soli- 
tude and the silent society of books. And what 
discussions can we not fancy there, of language, of 
diction, of style, of ancients and moderns, of gram- 
mar even, for our speech was still at school, and 
with license of vagrant truancy for the gathering 
of wild flowers and the finding of whole nests full 
of singing birds ! Here was indeed a new World 
of Words, as Florio called his dictionary. And 
the face-to-face criticism, frank, friendly, and with 
chance of reply, how fruitful it must have been ! 



16 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

It was here, doubtless, tliat Jonson found fault 
witli that verse of Shakespeare's, — 

" Caesar did never wrong but with just cause," 

which is no longer to be found in the play of " Julius 
Caesar." Perhaps Heminge and Condell left it 
out, for Shakespeare could have justified himself 
with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome's favorite 
Greek quotation, that nothing justified crime but 
the winning or keeping of supreme power. Never 
could London, before or since, gather such an acad- 
emy of genius. It must have been a marvellous 
whetstone of the wits, and spur to generous emula- 
tion. 

Another great advantage -which the authors of 
that day had was the freshness of the language, 
which had not then become literary, and therefore 
more or less commonplace. All the w^ords they 
used were bright from the die, not yet worn smooth 
in the daily drudgery of prosaic service. I am 
not sure whether they were so fully conscious of 
this as w^e are, who find a surprising charm in it, 
and perhaps endow the poet with the witchery that 
reaUy belongs to the vocables he employs. The 
parts of speech of these old poets are just archaic 
enough to please us with that familiar strangeness 
which makes our own tongue agreeable if spoken 
Avith a hardly perceptible foreign accent. The 
power of giving novelty to things outworn is, 
indeed, one of the prime qualities of genius, and 
this novelty the habitual phrase of the Elizabeth- 
ans has for us without any merit of theirs. But I 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 17 

think, making all due abatements, that they had 
the hermetic gift of buckling wings to the feet of 
their verse in a measure which has fallen to the 
share of few or no modern poets. I think some of 
them certainly were fully aware of the fine qual- 
ities of their mother-tongue. Chapman, in the 
poem '* To the Reader," prefixed to his translation 
of the Iliad, protests against those who preferred 
to it the softer Romance languages : — 

" And for our tongue that still is so impaired 
By travailing- linguists, I can prove it clear, 

That no tongue hath the Muses' utterance heired 
For verse and that sweet Music to the ear 

Strook out of rime, so naturally as this ; 
Our monosyllables so kindly fall, 

And meet, opposed in rhyme, as they did kiss." 

I think Chapman has very prettily maintained and 
illustrated his thesis. But, though fortunate in 
being able to gather their language with the dew 
still on it, as herbs must be gathered for use in 
certain incantations, we are not to suppose that 
our elders used it indiscriminatel}^ or tumbled out 
their words as they would dice, trusting that luck 
or chance woidd send them a happy throw ; that 
they did not select, arrange, combine, and make 
use of the most cunning artifices of modulation 
and rhythm. They debated all these questions, 
we may be sure, not only with a laudable desire of 
excellence, and with a hope to make their native 
tongue as fitting a vehicle for poetry and eloquence 
as those of their neighbors, or as ^those of Greece 
and Rome, but also with something of the eager 
joy of adventure and discovery. They must have 



18 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

felt with Lucretius the delight of wandering over 
the pathless places of the Muse, and hence, perhaps, 
it is that their step is so elastic, and that we are 
never dispirited by a consciousness of any lassitude 
when they put forth their best pace. If they are nat- 
ural, it is in great part the benefit of the age they 
lived in ; but the winning graces, the picturesque 
felicities, the electric flashes, I had almost said the 
explosions, of their style are their own. And their 
diction mingles its elements so kindly and with 
such gracious reliefs of changing key, now dallying 
with the very childishness of speech like the spin- 
sters and the knitters in the sun, and anon snatched 
up without effort to the rapt phrase of passion or 
of tragedy that flashes and reverberates ! 

The dullest of them, for I admit that many of 
them were dull as a comedy of Goethe, and dul- 
ness loses none of its disheartening properties by 
age, no, nor even by being embalmed in the pre- 
cious gems and spices of Lamb's affectionate eulogy, 
— for I am persuaded that I should know a stuj^id 
mummy from a clever one before I had been in his 
company five minutes, — the dullest of them, I say, 
has his lucid intervals. There are, I grant, dreary 
wastes and vast solitudes in such collections as 
Dodsley's '' Old Plays," where we slump along 
through the loose sand without even so much as a 
mirage to comfort us under the intolerable drought 
of our companion's discourse. Nay, even some of 
the dramatists who have been thought worthy of 
editions all to themselves, may enjoy that seclusion 
without fear of its being disturbed by me. 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 19 

Let me mention a name or two of such as I sliall 
not speak of in this course. Robert Greene is one 
of them. He has all the inadequacy of imperfectly 
drawn tea. I thank him, indeed, for the word 
" brightsome," and for two lines of Sephestia's 
song to her child, — 

" Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, 
When thou art old, there 's grief enough for thee," — 

which have all the innocence of the Old Age in 
them. Otherwise he is naught. I say this for the 
benefit of the young, for in my own callow days 
I took him seriously because the Rev. Alexander 
Dyce had edited him, and I endured much in 
trying to reconcile my instincts with my supersti- 
tion. He it was that called Shakespeare " an up- 
start crow beautified with our feathers," as if any 
one could have any use for feathers from such 
birds as he, except to make pens of them. He was 
the cause of the dulness that was in other men, 
too, and human nature feels itself partially avenged 
by this stanza of an elegy upon him by one 
" R. B.," quoted by Mr. Dyce : — 

" Greene is the pleasing object of an eye ; 

Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him ; 
Greene is the ground of every painter's dye ; 

Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him ; 
Nay, more, the men that so eclipsed his fame 
Purloyned his plumes ; can they deny the same ? " 

Even the libeller of Shakespeare deserved no- 
thing worse than this ! If this is " R. B." when 
he was playing upon words, what must he have 
been when serious ? 

Another dramatist whom we can get on very 



20 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

well without is George Peele, the friend and fellow- 
roisterer of Greene. He, too, defied the inspiring 
influence of the air he breathed almost as success- 
fully as his friend. But he had not that genius 
for being dull all the time that Greene had, and 
illustrates what I was just saying of the manner 
in which the most tiresome of these men waylay 
us when we least expect it with some phrase or 
verse that shines and trembles in the memory like 
a star. Such are : — 

" For her I '11 build a kingly bower 
Seated in hearing of a hundred streams " ; 

and this, of God's avenging lightning, — 

" At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt, 
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings, 
Sit ever burning in his hateful bones." 

He also wrote some musically simple stanzas, of 
which I quote the first two, the rather that Thack- 
eray was fond of them : — 

" My golden locks Time hath to silver turned 

(0 Time too swift, and swiftness never ceasing), 
My youth 'gainst age, and age at youth hath spurned. 

But spurned in vain ; youth waneth by increasing. 
Beauty, strength, and youth, flowers fading been ; 
Duty, faith, and love, are roots, and ever green. 

" My helmet now shall make an hive for bees. 
And lover's songs shall turn to holy psalms ; 

A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees. 
And feed on prayers, that are old age's alms. 

But though from court to cottage I depart, 

]VIy saint is sure of mine unspotted heart." 

There is a pensiveness in this, half pleasurable, 
half melancholy, that has a charm of its own. 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 21 

Thomas Dekker is a far more important person. 
Most of his works seem to have been what artists 
call pot-boilers, written at ruinous speed, and with 
the bailiff rather than the Muse at his elbow. 
There was a liberal background of prose in him, 
as in Ben Jonson, but he was a poet and no mean 
one, as he shows by the careless good luck of his 
epithets and similes. He could rise also to a 
grave dignity of style that is grateful to the ear, 
nor was he incapable of that heightened emotion 
which might almost pass for passion. His fancy 
kindles wellnigh to imagination at times, and 
ventures on those extravagances which entice the 
fancy of the reader as with the music of an invita- 
tion to the waltz. I had liim in my mind when 
I was speaking of the obiter dicta, of the fine 
verses dropt casually by these men when you are 
beginning to think they have no poetry in them. 
Fortune tells Fortunatus, in the play of that name, 
that he shall have gold as countless as 

" Those g-ilded wantons that in swarms do run 
To warm their slender bodies in the sun," 

thus giving him a hint also of its ephemeral nature. 
Here is a verse, too, that shows a kind of bleakish 
sympathy of sound and sense. Long life, he tells 
us, — 

" Is a long- journey in December gone." 

It may be merely my fancy, but I seem to hear a 
melancholy echo in it, as of footfalls on frozen 
earth. Or take this for a pretty fancy : — 

" The moon hath through her bow scarce drawn to the head, 
Like to twelve silver arrows, all the months 
Since — " 



22 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

when do you suppose ? I give you three guesses, 
as the children say. Since 1600 ! Poor Fancy 
shudders at this opening or Haydn's '' Dictionary 
of Dates " and thinks her silver arrows a little out 
of place, like a belated masquerader going home 
under the broad grin of day. But the verses them- 
selves seem plucked from " Midsummer-Night's 
Dream." 

This is as good an instance as may be of the 
want of taste, of sense of congruity, and of the del- 
icate discrimination that makes style, which strikes 
and sometimes even shocks us in the Old Drama- 
tists. This was a disadvantage of the age into 
which they were born, and is perhaps implied in 
the very advantages it gave them, and of which 
I have spoken. Even Shakespeare offends some- 
times in this way. Good taste, if mainly a gift of 
nature, is also an acquisition. It was not unpos- 
sible even then. Samuel Daniel had it, but the cau- 
tious propriety with which it embarrassed him has 
made his drama of " Cleopatra " unapproachable, 
in more senses than one, in its frigid regularity. 
His contemplative poetry, thanks to its grave 
sweetness of style, is among the best in our lan- 
guage. And Daniel wrote the following sentences, 
which explain better than anything I could say 
why his contemporaries, in spite of their manifest 
imperfections, pleased then and continue to please : 
" Suffer the world to enjoy that which it knows 
and what it likes, seeing whatsoever form of words 
doth move delight, and sway the affections of men, 
in what Scythian sort soever it be disposed and 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 23 

uttered, that is true number, measure, eloquence, 
and the perfection of speech." Those men did 
" move delight, and sway the affections of men," in 
a very singular manner, gaining, on the whole, per- 
haps, more by their liberty than they lost by their 
license. But it is only genius that can safely pro- 
fit by this immunity. Form, of which we hear so 
much, is of great value, but it is not of the highest 
value, except in combination with other qualities 
better than itseK ; and it is worth noting that the 
modern English poet who seems least to have re- 
garded it, is also the one who has most powerfully 
moved, swayed, and delighted those who are wise 
enough to read him. 

One more passage and I have done. It is from 
the same play of " Old Fortunatus," a favorite of 
mine. The Soldan of Babylon shows Fortunatus 
his treasury, or cabinet of bric-a-brac : — 

** Behold yon tower: there stands mine armoury, 
In which are corselets forged of beaten gold 
To arm ten hundred thousand fighting men, 
Whose glittering squadrons when the sun beholds, 
They seem like to ten hundred thousand Joves, 
When Jove on the proud back of thunder rides, 
Trapped all in lightning-flames. There can I show thee 
The ball of gold that set all Troy on fire ; 
There shalt thou see the scarf of Cupid's mother, 
Snatcht from the soft moist ivory of her arm 
To wrap about Adonis' wounded thigh ; 
There shalt thou see a wheel of Titan's car 
Which dropt from Heaven when Phaethon fired the world. 
I '11 give thee (if thou wilt) two silver doves 
Composed by magic to divide the air, 
Who, as they flie, shall clap their silver wings 
And give strange music to the elements. 



24 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

I '11 give thee else the fan o£ Proserpine, 
Which, in reward for a sweet Thracian song, 
The blackbrow'd Empress threw to Orpheus, 
Being come to fetch Eurydice from hell." 

This is, here and there, tremblingly near bom- 
bast, but its exuberance is cheery, and the quaint- 
ness of Proserpine's fan shows how real she was to 
the poet. Hers was a generous gift, considering 
the climate in which Dekker evidently supposed 
her to dwell, and speaks well for the song that 
could make her forget it. There is crudeness, as if 
the wine had been drawn before the ferment was 
over, but the arm of Venus is from the life, and 
that one verse gleams and glows among the rest 
like the thing it describes. The whole passage is 
a good example of fancy, whimsical, irresponsible. 
But there is more imagination and power to move 
the imagination in Shakespeare's " sunken wreck 
and sunless treasures " than all his contemporaries 
together, not even excepting Marlowe, could have 
mustered. 

We lump all these poets together as dramatists 
because they wrote for the theatre, and yet how little 
they were truly dramatic seems proved by the fact 
that none, or next to none, of their plays have held 
the stage. Not one of their characters, that I can 
remember, has become one of the familiar figures 
that make up the habitual society of any cultivated 
memory even of the same race and tongue. Mar- 
lowe, great as he was, makes no exception. To 
some of them we cannot deny genius, but creative 
genius we must deny to all of them, and dramatic 
genius as well. 



THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 25 

This last, indeed, is one of the rarest gifts be- 
stowed on man. What is that which we call dra- 
matic ? In the abstract, it is thought or emotion in 
action, or on its way to become action. In the con- 
crete, it is that which is more vivid if represented 
than described, and which would lose if merely nar- 
rated. Goethe, for example, had little dramatic 
power; though, if taking thought could have 
earned it, he would have had enough, for he stud- 
ied the actual stage all his life. The characters in 
his plays seem rather to express his thoughts than 
their own. Yet there is one admirably dramatic 
scene in "Faust" which illustrates what I have been 
saying. I mean Margaret in the cathedral, sug- 
gested to Goethe by the temptation of Justina in 
Calderon's " Magico Prodigioso," but full of horror 
as that of seductiveness. We see and hear as we 
read. Her own bad conscience projected in the 
fiend who mutters despair into her ear, and the 
awful peals of the " Dies Irae," that most terribly 
resonant of Latin hymns, as if blown from the very 
trump of doom itself, coming in at intervals to re- 
mind her that the 

' ' Tuba mlrum spargens soniim 
Per sepulchra regionum 
Coget oranes ante thronum," 

herself among the rest, — all of this would be 
weaker in narration. This is real, and needs reali- 
zation by the senses to be fully felt. Compare it 
with Dimmesdale mounting the pillory at night, in 
" The Scarlet Letter," to my thinking the deepest 
thrust of what may be called the metaphysical im- 



2(; 77//'; OLD I'lNCLlSJI DRAM A 11 SI'S 

n<;iii;iti<)n sIikm' Sliiikcspcarc. 'I'licrc, vv(^ need only 
Ji stjiiciiK'nt of tlic! facts — ])i('toi'Ial Hlatcmciit, of 
con rH(% :is I lawllioi-iic's could iiol, fail lo Ix' — and 
tli(5 cl'fcct is coiiiplctc. ^l'ljoroiij;ldy to midcrstaiid 
Jl <^{Hn\ play aii<l <'iij«)y it, even in tlu^ i*cadin<;-, lli(5 
jina|;ination must Ixxly foitli its jxTsonan'cs, and 
Hvvi tlicni doin;^- or snlfcrin^" in tli(^ visionary thcati'Ci 
of ilic hrain. Tlicrc, indccMl, tlu^y arc; hcst S(M'n, 
and llamlct or Lear loses that, ideal (juality wliicli 
inak(\4 liini typical and nnivc^rsal if Ik; Ix; once; com- 
])r(;ssed vvitliin tlu; limits, or assoeiatcid with the 
lineaments, of any, ov(;n the luist, actor. 

It is foi- t.lieir p()(;tieal (pialiti(;s, for tlxiir <;"lcams 
of ima<;inat,ion, lor tlieii' (piaint and siihth; fanciers, 
i'oi- their tender sentiment, and for tluiir (diarm of 
diction that these old playwrij;'hts aic worth road- 
in<j^. 'rin'y are tin; hest comment also to convince 
us of th(! innnc^asnrahle snperiority of Shakespeare!. 
Several of them, moreover, have Imm'U v<'ry inad- 
('(piatcly edited, or not at all, which is ])(Mha:)>s heft- 
ier; and it. is no useless (liseiplin(; of the wits, no 
nnworthy (exercise of the mind, to do our own edit- 
ing as w(; ^o alon^', winnini;- hack to its cradle tlu; 
ri«;ht word for the chan«;-elin<;- the; ))rint.(M"s have left 
in his stead, niakinji^ tlu; Lime veises iind their feet 
a<;ain, and rescnin<j^ those; that hav(; been tumhled 
ln^'^lcdy-pi^j;'lcdy into a niirc of ])ros(;. A strcuiii- 
ous study of this kind will enabh; us better to un- 
derstand many a faulty ])assa<i^c in our Shal<cs])(;are, 
and to jud<i;'(; of the ])roposed emendations of them, 
or to mak(; one to our own likin<^. There is no 
better school for learnini;- Knf;lish, and for learning 



77/ a; old hn a LI sir duamaiisis 27 

it wlicn, ill iiiMiiy linpoitjiiiL rcKpccJs, It was at its 
LcHt. 

I JiHi not Hur(5 tlijit I .shall nots(M!m to talk to you 
of many thiii<^s that scuiin trivialities if wc^i^hcul in 
tho hu^(; l)usin(^ss scjilcjs of life, l)iit I am always 
f»la(l to say a word in behalf of wliat most nu^n (ron- 
sidcr us<'less, and to say it the rather h(H;aiis(5 it has 
HO lew fii(;nds. 1 ha,V(^ ohservcMl, jind <'im soiiy to 
hav(^ ohscM'ved, tliat r]n<;lish poc^try, at h-ast in its 
older examph;s, is h\ss read now than when I was 
youn^. I <io not b(ili(^V(5 this to he a, heidthy symp- 
tom, for poetiy fiecpicnts and keeps haJ)ital)l(^ tliose 
upjxa' (^liambers of tlie mind tliat ofUMi towards th(^ 
sun's rising. It lias secinuid to me that life; was 
running more and more into j)roH(;. Ev(!n our 
books for childr(;n have been growing mon; and 
more practical and n^alistic;. '^FIk! fa,iri(;s an; no 
longer p(;nnitted to print thcsir rings on the te-iidca* 
sward of the; ehihTs fancy, and y<'t it is the child's 
faiK^y that sometimc^s liv<;s obs(Mir(dy on to ministcir 
un<'Xp<'et<'d sohicc; to the; lonelier and less sociable 
mind of tin; man. Our iiatnrc; r(;s(;nts this, and 
seeks r(diig(; in the holes and corners wher<; (roarser 
cxcit(!m<'nts may Ix; had at dearer rates. I some- 
times find myscdf thinUing that if this hard<'nlng 
pro(r(;ss should go much farther, it is b(dor(; ns, and 
not Ixdiind, that we should look for tlu; Ag(; of 
Flint. 



II 

MARLOWE 

I SHALL preface what I have to say of Marlowe 
with a few words as to the refinement which had 
been going on in the language, and the greater 
ductility which it had been rapidly gaining, and 
which fitted it for the use of the remarkable group 
of men who made an epoch of the reign of Eliza- 
beth. Spenser was undoubtedly the poet to whom 
we owe most in this respect, and the very great con- 
trast between his " Shepherd's Calendar," pub- 
lished in 1579, and his later poems awakens curi- 
osity. In his earliest work there are glimpses, 
indeed, of those special qualities which have won 
for him the name of the poet's poet, but they are 
rare and fugitive, and certainly never would have 
warranted the prediction of such poetry as was to 
follow. There is nothing here to indicate that a 
great artist in language had been born. Two 
causes, I suspect, were mainly effective in this 
transformation, I am almost tempted to say tran- 
substantiation, of the man. The first was his 
practice in translation (true also of Marlowe), than 
which nothing gives a greater choice and mastery 
of one's mother - tongue, for one must pause and 
weigh and judge every word with the greatest 
nicety, and cunningly transfuse idiom into idiom. 
The other, and by far the more important, was his 



MARLOWE 29 

study of the Italian poets. The " Faerie Queene " 
is full of loving reminiscence of them, but their 
happiest influence is felt in his lyrical poems. For 
these, I think, make it plain that Italy first taught 
him how much of the meaning of verse is in its 
music, and trained his ear to a sense of the harmony 
as well as the melody of which English verse was 
capable or might be made capable. Compare the 
sweetest passage in any lyric of the " Shepherd's 
Calendar " with the eloquent ardor of the poorest, 
if any be poor, in the " Epithalamion," and we find 
ourselves in a new world where music had just been 
invented. This we owe, beyond any doubt, to 
Spenser's study of the Italian canzone. Nay, the 
whole metrical movement of the " Epithalamion " 
recalls that of Petrarca's noble " Spirto gentilJ'^ I 
repeat that melody and harmony were first natura- 
lized in our language by Spenser. I love to recall 
these debts, for it is pleasant to be grateful even to 
the dead. 

Other men had done their share towards what 
may be called the modernization of our English, 
and among these Sir Philip Sidney was conspicuous. 
He probably gave it greater ease of movement, and 
seems to have done for it very much what Dryden 
did a century later in establishing terms of easier 
intercourse between the language of literature and 
the language of cultivated society. 

There had been good versifiers long before. 
Chaucer, for example, and even Gower, wearisome 
as he mainly is, made verses sometimes not only 
easy in movement, but in which the language seems 



80 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

strangely modern. That most dolefully dreary of 
books, " The Mirror for Magistrates," and Sackville, 
more than any of its authors, did something towards 
restoring the dignity of verse, and helj^ing it to 
recover its self-respect, while Spenser was still a 
youth. Tame as it is, the sunshine of that age here 
and there touches some verse that ripples in the 
sluggish current with a flicker of momentary illumi- 
nation. But before Spenser, no English verse had 
ever soared and sung, or been filled with what Sid- 
ney calls " divine delightfulness." Sidney, it may 
be conjectured, did more by private criticism and 
argument than by example. Drayton says of 
him : — 

" The noble Sidney with this last arose, 
That heroe for numbers and for prose, 
That throughly paced our language as to show 
The plenteous English hand in hand might go 
With Greek and Latin, and did first reduce 
Our tongue from Lilly's writing then in use." 

But even the affectations of Lilly were not without 
their use as helps to refinement. If, like Chaucer's 
f rere, — 

" Somewhat he lisped, for his wantonness," 

it was through the desire 

" To make his English sweet upon his tongue." 

It was the general clownishness against which he 
revolted, and we owe liim our thanks for it. To 
show of what brutalities even recent writers could 
be capable, it will suffice to mention that Golding, 
in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, makes 
a witch mutter the devil's pater-noster, and Ulysses 
express his fears of going " to pot." I should like 



MARLOWE 31 

to read you a familiar sonnet of Sidney's for its 
sweetness : — 

" Come, Sleep : O Sleep ! the certain knot of peace, 

The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, 
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, 

The indifferent judge between the high and low; 
With shield of proof, shield me from out the press 

Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw ; 
O make in me those civil wars to cease : 

I will good tribute pay if thou do so. 
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed, 

A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light, 
A rosy garland, and a weary head : 

And if these things, as being thine of right, 
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me. 
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see." 

Here is ease and .simplicity ; but in such a 
phrase as " baiting-place of wit " there is also a 
want of that perfect discretion which we demand 
of the language of poetry, however we may be glad 
to miss it in the thought or emotion which that lan- 
guage conveys. Baiting-place is no more a home- 
spun word than the word irm^ which adds a charm 
to one of the sweetest verses that Spenser ever 
wrote ; but haiting-j)lace is common, it smacks of 
the hostler and postilion, and commonness is a very 
poor relation indeed of simplicity. But doubtless 
one main cause of the vivacity of pln-ase which so 
charms us in our earlier writers is to be found in 
the fact that there were not yet two languages — 
that of life and that of literature. The divorce be- 
tween the two took place a century and a half later, 
and that process of breeding in and in began which 
at last reduced the language of verse to a kind of 
idiocy. 



82 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Do not consider sucli discussions as these otiose 
or nugatory. The language we are fortunate 
enough to share, and which, I think, Jacob Grimm 
was right in pronouncing, in its admirable mixture 
of Saxon and Latin, its strength and sonorousness, 
a better literary medium than any other modern 
tongue — this language has not been fashioned to 
what it is without much ex23eriment, much failure, 
and infinite expenditure of pains and thought. 
Genius and pedantry have each done its part 
towards the result which seems so easy to us, and 
yet was so hard to win — the one by way of exam- 
ple, the other by way of warning. The purity, the 
elegance, the decorum, the chastit}^ of our mother- 
tongue are a sacred trust in our hands. I am tired 
of hearing the foolish talk of an American variety 
of it, about our privilege to make it what we will 
because we are in a majority. A language belongs 
to those who know best how to use it, how to brinsr 
out all its resources, how to make it search its cof- 
fers round for the pithy or canorous phrase that 
suits the need, and they who can do this have been 
always in a pitiful minority. Let us be thankful 
that we too have a right to it, and have proved our 
right, but let us set up no claim to vulgarize it. 
The English of Abraham Lincoln was so good not 
because he learned it in Illinois, but because he 
learned it of Shakespeare and Milton and the Bible, 
the constant companions of his leisure. And how 
perfect it was in its homely dignity, its quiet 
strength, the unerring aim with which it struck 
once nor needed to strike more ! The language is 



MARLOWE 33 

alive here, and will grow. Let us do all we can 
with it but debase it. Good taste may not be 
necessary to salvation or to success in life, but it is 
one of the most powerful factors of civilization. 
As a people we have a larger share of it and more 
widely distributed than I, at least, have found else- 
where, but as a nation we seem to lack it altogether. 
Our coinage is ruder than that of any country of 
equal pretensions, our paper money is filthily in- 
fectious, and the engraving on it, mechanically 
perfect as it is, makes of every bank-note a mission- 
ary of barbarism. This should make us cautious 
of trying our hand in the same fashion on the cir- 
culating medium of thought. But it is high time 
that I should remember Maitre Guillaume of Pa- 
telin, and come back to my sheep. 

In coming to speak of Marlowe, I cannot help 
fearing that I may fail a little in that equanimity 
which is the first condition of all helpful criticism. 
Generosity there should be, and enthusiasm there 
should be, but they should stop short of extrava- 
gance. Praise shoidd not weaken into eulogy, nor 
blame fritter itself away into fault-finding. Goethe 
tells us that the first thing needfid to the critic, 
as indeed it is to the wise man generally, is to see 
the thing as it really is ; this is the most precious 
result of all culture, the surest warrant of happi- 
ness, or at least of composure. But he also bids 
us, in judging any work, seek first to discover its 
beauties, and then its blemishes or defects. Now 
there are two poets whom I feel that I can never 
judge without a favorable bias. One is Spenser, 



34 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

who was the first poet I ever read as a boy, not 
drawn to him by any enchantment of his matter or 
style, but simply because the first verse of his great 
poem was, — 

*' A g-entle knight was pricking on the plain," 

and I followed gladly, wishful of adventure. Of 
course I understood nothing of the allegory, never 
suspected it, fortunately for me, and am surprised 
to think how much of the language I understood. 
At any rate, I grew fond of him, and whenever I 
see the little brown folio in wliich I read, my heart 
warms to it as to a friend of my cliildliood. With 
Marlowe it was otherwise. With him I grew 
acquainted during the most impressible and recep- 
tive period of my youth. He was the first man of 
genius I had ever really kno^vn, and he naturally 
bewitched me. What cared I that they said he 
was a deboshed fellow ? nay, an atheist ? To me 
he was the voice of one singing in the desert, of 
one who had found the water of life for which I 
was panting, and was at rest under the palms. 
How can he ever become to me as other poets are ? 
But I shall try to be lenient in my admiration. 

Christopher Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker, 
was born at Canterbury, in February, 1563, was 
matricidated at Benet College, Cambridge, in 1580, 
received his degree of bachelor there in 1583 and 
of master in 1587. He came early to London, and 
was already known as a dramatist before the end of 
his twenty-fourth year. There is some reason for 
thinking that he was at one time an actor. He was 



MARLOWE 35 

killed in a tavern brawl, by a man named Archer, 
in 1593, at tlie age of thirty. He was taxed with 
atheism, but on inadequate grounds, as it appears 
to me. That he was said to have written a tract 
against the Trinity, for which a license to print was 
refused on the ground of blasphemy, might easily 
have led to the greater charge. That he had some 
opinions of a kind unusual then may be inferred, 
perhaps, from a passage in his " Faust." Faust asks 
Mephistopheles how, being damned, he is out of 
hell. And Mephistopheles answers, " Why, this is 
hell, nor am I out of it." And a little farther on 
he explains himself thus : — 

*' Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed 
In one self place ; for where we are is hell, 
And where hell is there must we ever be ; 
And, to conclude, when all the earth dissolves, 
And every creature shall be purified. 
All places shall be hell that are not heaven." 

Milton remembered the first passage I have quoted, 
and puts nearly the same words into the mouth of 
his Lucifer. If Marlowe was a liberal thinker, it 
is not strange that in that intolerant age he should 
have incurred the stigma of general unbelief. Men 
are apt to blacken opinions which are distasteful 
to them, and along with them the character of him 
who holds them. 

This at least may be said of him without risk of 
violating the rule of ne quid nimis, that he is one 
of the most masculine and fecundatingf natures in 
the long line of British poets. Perhaps his energy 
was even in excess. There is in him an Oriental 



36 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

lavishness. He will impoverisli a province for a 
simile, and pour the revenues of a kingdom into 
the lap of a description. In that delightful story 
in the book of Esdras, King Darius, who has just 
dismissed all his captains and governors of cities 
and satraps, after a royal feast, sends couriers gal- 
loping after them to order them all back again, be- 
cause he has found a riddle under his j)illow, and 
wishes their aid in solving it. Marlowe in like 
manner calls in help from every the remotest cor- 
ner of earth and heaven for what seems to us as 
trivial an occasion. I will not say that he is bom- 
bastic, but he constantly pushes grandiosity to the 
verge of bombast. His contemporaries thought he 
passed it in his " Tamburlaine." His imagination 
flames and flares, consuming what it should caress, 
as Jupiter did Semele. That exquisite phrase of 
Hamlet, "the modesty of nature," would never 
have occurred to him. Yet in the midst of the 
hurly-burly there will fall a sudden hush, and we 
come upon passages cahn and pellucid as mountain 
tarns filled to the brim with the purest distillations 
of heaven. And, again, there are single verses 
that open silently as roses, and surprise us with 
that seemingly accidental perfection, which there 
is no use in talking about because itself says all 
that is to be said and more. 

There is a passage in " Tamburlaine " which I 
remember reading in the first course of lectures 
I ever delivered, thirty-four years ago, as a poet's 
feeling of the inadequacy of the word to the idea : — 

" If all the pens that ever poets held 
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 



MARLOWE 37 

And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
Their minds, and muses on admired themes ; 
If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
The highest reaches of a human wit ; — 
If these had made one poem's period, 
And all combined in beauty's worthiness, 
Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
Which into words no virtue can digest." 

Marlowe made snatches at tliis forbidden fruit 
with vigorous leaps, and not without bringing away 
a prize now and then such as only the fewest have 
been able to reach. Of fine single verses I give a 
few as instances of this : — 

"Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian's shape, 
With hair that gilds the water as it glides, 
Shall bathe him in a spring." 

Here is a couplet notable for dignity of poise de- 
scribing Tamburlaine : — 

" Of stature tall and straightly fashioned, 
Like his desire, lift upward and divine." 

" For every street like to a firmament 
Glistered with breathing stars." 

" Un wedded maids 
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows 
Than have the white breasts of the queen of Love." 

This from " Tamburlaine " is particularly charac- 
teristic : — 

" Nature 
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds. 
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
The wondrous architecture of the world, 
And measure every wandering planet's course. 



38 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Still climbing' after knowledge infinite, 
And always moving as the restless spheres, 
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest 
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all." 

One of these verses reminds us of that exquisite 
one of Shakespeare where he says that Love is 

" Still climbing trees in the Hesperides." 

But Shakespeare puts a complexity of meaning into 
his chance sayings, and lures the fancy to excur- 
sions of which Marlowe never dreamt. 

But, alas, a voice will not illustrate like a stere- 
opticon, and tliis tearing away of fragments that 
seem to bleed with the avulsion is like breaking off 
a finger from a statue as a specimen. 

The impression he made upon the men of his 
time was uniform ; it was that of something new 
and strange ; it was that of genius, in short. Dray- 
ton says of him, kindling to an unwonted warmth, 
as if he loosened himself for a moment from the 
choking coils of his Polyolbion for a larger 
breath : — 

' ' Next Marlowe bathed in the Thespian springs 
Had in him those brave translunary things 
That the first poets had ; his raptures were 
All air and fire, which made his verses clear ; 
For that fine madness still he did retain 
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain." 

And Chapman, taking up and continuing Mar- 
lowe's half-told story of Hero and Leander, breaks 
forth suddenly into this enthusiasm of invocation : — 

" Then, ho ! most strangely intellectual fire 
That, proper to my soiil, hast power to inspire 



MARLOWE 39 

Her burning faculties, and with the wings 
Of thy unsphered flame visit'st the springs 
Of spirits immortal, now (as swift as Time 
Doth follow motion) find the eternal clime 
Of his free soul whose living subject stood 
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood." 

Surely Chapman would have sent his soul on no 
such errand had he believed that the soul of Mar- 
lowe was in torment, as his accusers did not scruple 
to say that it was, sent thither by the manifestly 
Divine judgment of his violent death. 

Yes, Drayton was right in classing him with 
" the first poets," for he was indeed such, and so 
continues, — that is, he was that most indefinable 
thing, an original man, and therefore as fresh and 
contemporaneous to-day as he was three hundred 
years ago. Most of us are more or less hampered 
by our own individuality, nor can shake ourselves 
free of that chrysalis of consciousness and give our 
" souls a loose," as Dryden calls it in his vigorous 
way. And yet it seems to me that there is some- 
thing even finer than that fine madness, and I think 
I see it in the imperturbable sanity of Shakespeare, 
which made him so much an artist that his new 
work still bettered his old. I think I see it even 
in the almost irritating calm of Goethe, which, if 
it did not quite make him an artist, enabled him to 
see what an artist should be, and to come as near 
to being one as his nature allowed. Marlowe was 
certainly not an artist in the larger sense, but he 
was cunning in words and periods and the musical 
modulation of them. And even this is a very rare 
gift. But his mind coidd never submit itself to a 



40 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

controlling purpose, and renounce all other things 
for the sake of that. His plays, with the single 
exception of " Edward II.," have no organic unity, 
and such unity as is here is more apparent than 
real. Passages in them stir us deeply and thrill 
us to the marrow, but each play as a whole is in- 
efPectual. Even his " Edward II." is regular only 
to the eye by a more orderly arrangement of scenes 
and acts, and Marlowe evidently felt the drag of 
this restraint, for we miss the uncontrollable en- 
ergy, the eruptive fire, and the feeling that he was 
happy in his work. Yet Lamb was hardly extra- 
vagant in saying that " the death scene of Mar- 
lowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any 
scene, ancient or modern, with which I am ac- 
quainted." His tragedy of " Dido, Queen of Car- 
thage," is also regularly plotted out, and is also 
somewhat tedious. Yet there are many touches 
that betray his burning hand. There is one pas- 
sage illustrating that luxury of description into 
which Marlowe is always glad to escape from the 
business in hand. Dido tells ^neas : — 

" ^neas, I '11 repair thy Trojan ships 
Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me, 
And let Achates sail to Italy ; 
I '11 give thee tackling made of rivelled gold, 
Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees ; 
Oars of massy ivory, full of holes 
Through which the water shall delight to play ; 
Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks 
Which, if thou lose, shall shine above the waves ; 
The masts whereon thy swelling sails shall hang 
Hollow pyramides of silver plate ; 
The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought 



MARLOWE 41 

The wars of Troy, but not Troy's overthrow ; 
For ballast, empty Dido's treasury ; 
Take what ye will, but leave ^neas here. 
Achates, thou shalt be so seemly clad 
As sea-born nymphs shall swarm about thy ships 
And wanton mermaids court thee with sweet songs, 
Flinging in favors of more sovereign worth 
Than Thetis hangs about Apollo's neck. 
So that ^neas may but stay with me." 

But far finer than this, in the same costly way, 
is the speech of Barabas in " The Jew of Malta," 
ending with a line that has incorporated itself in 
the language with the familiarity of a proverb : — 

" Give me the merchants of the Indian mines 
That trade in metal of the purest mould ; 
The wealthy Moor that in the Eastern rocks 
Without control can pick his riches up. 
And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones, 
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight ; 
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 
Jacynths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, 
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds. 
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price 
As one of them, indifferently rated. 



May serve in peril of calamity 

To ransom great kings from captivity. 

This is the ware wherein consists my wealth : 



Infinite riches in a little room." 



This is the very poetry of avarice. 

Let us now look a little more closely at Mar- 
lowe as a dramatist. Here also he has an impor- 
tance less for what he accomplished than for what 
he suggested to others. Not only do I think that 
Shakespeare's verse caught some hints frpm his, 



42 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

but there are certain descriptive passages and sim- 
iles of the greater poet which, whenever I read 
them, instantly bring Marlowe to my mind. This 
is an impression I might find it hard to convey to 
another, or even to make definite to myseK ; but it 
is an old one, and constantly repeats itself, so that I 
put some confidence in it. Marlowe's " Edward II." 
certainly served Shakespeare as a model for his 
earlier historical plays. Of course he surpassed 
his model, but Marlowe might have said of him as 
Oderisi, with pathetic modesty, said to Dante of 
his rival and surpasser. Franco of Bologna, " The 
praise is now all his, yet mine in part." But it is 
always thus. The path-finder is forgotten when 
the track is once blazed out. It was in Shake- 
speare's " Richard II." that Lamb detected the influ- 
ence of Marlowe, saying that " the reluctant pangs 
of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints 
which Shakespeare has scarce improved upon in 
Richard." In the parallel scenes of both plays 
the sentiment is rather elegiac than dramatic, but 
there is a deeper pathos, I think, in Richard, and 
his grief rises at times to a passion which is wholly 
wanting in Edward. Let me read Marlowe's abdi- 
cation scene. The irresolute nature of the king is 
finely indicated. The Bishop of Winchester has 
come to demand the crown ; Edward takes it off, 
and says : — 

" Here, take my crown ; the life of Edward too : 
Two kings of England cannot reign at once. 
But stay awhile : let me be king till night, 
That I may gaze upon this glittering crown ; 
So shall ray eyes receive their last content, 



MARLOWE 43 

My head the latest honor due to it, 

And jointly both yield up their wished right. 

Continue ever, thou celestial sun ; 

Let never silent night possess this clime ; 

Stand still, you watches of the element ; 

All times and seasons, rest you at a stay — 

That Edward may be still fair England's king ! 

But day's bright beam doth vanish fast away, 

And needs I must resign my wished crown. 

Inhuman creatures, nursed with tiger's milk, 

Why gape you for your sovereign's overthrow ? — 

My diadem, I mean, and guiltless life. 

See, monsters, see, I '11 wear my crown again. 

What, fear you not the fury of your king ? 

I '11 not resign, but, whilst I live, be king ! " 

Then, after a short further parley : — 

" Here, receive my crown. 
Receive it ? No ; these innocent hands of mine 
Shall not be guilty of so foul a crime : 
He of you all that most desires my blood, 
And will be called the murderer of a king, 
Take it. What, are you moved ? Pity you me ? 
Then send for unrelenting Mortimer, 
And Isabel, whose eyes, being turned to steel, 
Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear. 
Yet stay, for rather than I '11 look on them. 
Here, here ! — Now, sweet God of Heaven, 
Make me despise this transitory pomp. 
And sit for aye enthroniz^d in Heaven ! 
Come, Death, and with thy fingers close my eyes, 
Or, if I live, let me forget myself." 

Surely one might fancy that to be from the 
prentice hand of Shakespeare. It is no small dis- 
tinction that this can be said of Marlowe, for it can 
be said of no other. What follows is still finer. 
The ruffian who is to murder Edward, in order to 



44 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

evade liis distrust, pretends to weep. The king 
exclaims : — 

" Weep'st thou already ? List awhile to me, 
And then thy heart, were it as Gurney's is, 
Or as Matrevis', hewn from the Caucasus, 
Yet will it melt ere I have done my tale. 
This dungeon where they keep me is the sink 
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls, 
And there in mire and puddle have I stood 
This ten days' space ; and, lest that I should sleep, 
One plays continually upon a drum ; 
They give me bread and water, being a king ; 
So that, for want of sleep and sustenance, 
My mind 's distempered and my body numbed, 
And whether I have limbs or no I know not. 
O, would my blood dropt out from every vein, 
As doth this water from my tattered robes ! 
Tell Isabel the queen I looked not thus, 
When, for her sake, I ran at tilt in France, 
And there unhorsed the Duke of Cleremont." 

This is even more in Shakespeare's early manner 
than the other, and it is not ungrateful to our feel- 
ing of his immeasurable supremacy to think that 
even he had been helped in his schooling. There 
is a truly royal pathos in " They give me bread and 
water " ; and " Tell Isabel the queen," instead of 
" Isabel my queen," is the most vividly dramatic 
touch that I remember anywhere in Marlowe. And 
that vision of the brilliant tournament, not more 
natural than it is artistic, how does it not deepen 
by contrast the gloom of all that went before ! But 
you will observe that the verse is rather epic than 
dramatic. I mean by this that its every pause and 
every movement are regularly cadenced. There is 
a kingly composure in it, perhaps, but were the 



MARLOWE 45 

passage not so finely pathetic as it is, or the diction 
less naturally simple, it would seem stiff. Nothing 
is more peculiarly characteristic of the mature 
Shakespeare than the way in which his verses 
curve and wind themselves with the fluctuating 
emotion or passion of the speaker and echo his 
mood. Let me illustrate this by a speech of Imogen 
when Pisanio gives her a letter from her husband 
bidding her meet him at Milford-Haven. The 
words seem to waver to and fro, or huddle together 
before the hurrying thought, like sheep when the 
collie chases them. 

" O, for a horse with wings ! — Hear'st thou, Pisanio ? 
He is at Milford-Haven : read, and tell me 
How far 't is thither. If one of mean affairs 
May plod it in a week, why may not I 
Glide thither in a day ? — Then, true Pisanio — 
Who long'st like me to see thy lord ; who long'st 
O, let me 'bate — but not like me — yet long'st — 
But in a fainter kind : — O, not like me ; 
For mine 's beyond beyond : say, and speak thick, — 
Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing, 
To the smothering of the sense, — how far it is 
To this same blessed Milford : and, by the way, 
Tell me how Wales was made so happy as 
To inherit such a haven : but, first of all, 
How we may steal from hence." 

The whole speech is breathless with haste, and is 
in keeping not only with the feeling of the moment, 
but with what we already know of the impulsive 
character of Imogen. Marlowe did not, for he 
could not, teach Shakespeare this secret, nor has 
anybody else ever learned it. 

There are, properly speaking, no characters in 



46 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS. 

tlie plays of Marlowe — but personages and inter- 
locutors. We do not get to know them, but only 
to know what they do and say. The nearest ap- 
proach to a character is Barabas, in " The Jew of 
Malta," and he is but the incarnation of the pop- 
ular hatred of the Jew. There is really nothing 
human in him. He seems a bugaboo rather than 
a man. Here is his own account of himself : — 

" As for myself, I -walk abroad o' nights, 
And kill sick people groaning- under walls ; 
Sometimes I go about and poison wells ; 
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves, 
I am content to lose some of my crowns. 
That I may, walking in my gallery. 
See 'em go pinioned by my door along ; 
Being young, I studied physic, and began 
To practise first upon the Italian ; 
There I enriched the priests with burials, 
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure 
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells ; 
And, after that, was I an engineer. 
And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany, 
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth, 
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems. 
Then, after that, was I an usurer, 
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, 
And tricks belonging unto brokery, 
I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year. 
And with young orphans planted hospitals ; 
And every moon made some or other mad. 
And now and then one hang himself for grief, 
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll 
How I with interest tormented him. 
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them — 
I have as much coin as will buy the town." 

Here is nothing left for s^anpathy. This is the 
mere lunacy of distempered imagination. It is 



MARLOWE 47 

shocking, and not terrible. Shakespeare makes no 
such mistake with Shylock. His passions are those 
of a man, though of a man depraved by oppression 
and contumely ; and he shows sentiment, as when 
he says of the ring that Jessica had given for a 
monkey : " It was my turquoise. I had it of Leah 
when I was a bachelor." And yet, observe the 
profound humor with which Shakespeare makes 
him think first of its dearness as a precious stone 
and then as a keepsake. In letting him exact his 
pound of flesh, he but follows the story as he found 
it in Giraldi Cinthio, and is careful to let us know 
that this Jew had good reason, or thought he had, 
to hate Christians. At the end, I think he meant 
us to pity Shylock, and we do pity him. And with 
what a smiling background of love and poetry does 
he give relief to the sombre figure of the Jew ! In 
Marlowe's play there is no respite. And yet it 
comes nearer to having a connected plot, in which 
one event draws on another, than any other of his 
plays. I do not think Milman right in saying that 
the interest falls off after the first two acts. I find 
enough to carry me on to the end, where the defiant 
death of Barabas in a caldron of boiling oil he had 
arranged for another victim does something to 
make a man of him. But there is no controlling 
reason in the piece. Nothing happens because it 
must, but because the author wills it so. The con- 
ception of life is purely arbitrary, and as far from 
nature as that of an imaginative child. It is curi- 
ous, however, that here, too, Marlowe should have 
pointed the way to Shakespeare. But there is no 



48 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

resemblance between the Jew of Malta and the 
Jew of Venice, except that both have daughters 
whom they love. Nor is the analogy close even 
here. The love which Barabas professes for his 
child fails to humanize him to us, because it does 
not prevent him from making her the abhorrent 
instrument of his wanton malice in the death of her 
lover, and because we cannot believe him capable 
of loving anything but gold and vengeance. There 
is always something extravagant in the imagina- 
tion of Marlowe, but here it is the extravagance of 
absurdity. Generally he gives us an impression of 
power, of vastness, though it be the vastness of 
chaos, where elemental forces hurtle blindly one 
against the other. But they are elemental forces, 
and not mere stage properties. Even Tambur- 
laine, if we see in him — as Marlowe, I think, 
meant that we should see — the embodiment of 
brute force, without reason and without conscience, 
ceases to be a blusterer, and becomes, indeed, as he 
asserts himseK, the scourge of God. There is an 
exultation of strength in this play that seems to 
add a cubit to our stature. Marlowe had found 
the way that leads to style, and helped others to 
fmd it, but he never arrived there. He had not 
self-denial enough. He can refuse nothing to his 
fancy. He fails of his effect by over-emphasis, 
heaping upon a slender thought a burthen of ex- 
pression too heavy for it to carry. But it is not 
with fagots, but with priceless Oriental stuffs, that 
he breaks their backs. 

Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus " interests us in an- 



MARLOWE 49 

other way. Here he again shows himself as a 
precursor. There is no attempt at profound philo- 
sophy in this play, and in the conduct of it Mar- 
lowe has followed the prose history of Dr. Faustus 
closely, even in its scenes of mere buffoonery. Dis- 
engaged from these, the figure of the protagonist 
is not without grandeur. It is not avarice or lust 
that tempts him at first, but power. Weary of 
his studies in law, medicine, and divinity, which 
have failed to bring him what he seeks, he turns to 
necromancy : — 

' ' These metaphysics of magicians 
And necromantic books are heavenly. 



Oh, what a world of profit and delight, 

Of power, of honor, of omnipotence, 

Is promised to the studious artisan ! 

All things that move between the quiet poles 

Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings 

Are but obeyed in their several provinces. 

Nor can they raise the winds or rend the clouds ; 

But his dominion that exceeds in this 

Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man ; 

A sound magician is a mighty god : 

Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity." 

His good angel intervenes, but the evil spirit at the 
other ear tempts him with power again : — 

" Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky, 
Lord and commander of these elements." 

Ere long Faustus begins to think of power for 
baser uses : — 

" How am I glutted with conceit of this ! 
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, 
Resolve me of all ambiguities, 
Perform what desperate enterprise I will ? 



50 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

I '11 have them fly to India for gold, 
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, 
And search all corners of the new-found world 
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates ; 
1 11 have them read me strange philosophy, 
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings." 

And yet it is always to the pleasures of tlie intel- 
lect that he returns. It is when the good and evil 
spirits come to him for the second time that wealth 
is offered as a bait, and after Faustus has signed 
away his soul to Lucifer, he is tempted even by 
more sensual allurements. I may be reading into 
the book what is not there, but I cannot help think- 
ing that Marlowe intended in this to typify the in- 
evitably continuous degradation of a soul that has 
renomiced its ideal, and the drawing on of one vice 
by another, for they go hand in hand like the 
Hours. But even in his degradation the pleasures 
of Faustus are mainly of the mind, or at worst of a 
sensuous and not sensual kind. No doubt in this 
Marlowe is unwittingly betraying liis own tastes. 
Faustus is made to say : — 

" And long ere this I should have slain myself 
Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair. 
Have I not made blind Homer sing to me 
Of Alexander's love and OEnon's death ? 
And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes 
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp 
Made nmsic with my Mephistophilis ? 
Why should I die, then ? basely why despair ? " 

This employment of the devil in a duet seems 
odd. I remember no other instance of his appear- 
ing as a musician except in Burns' s " Tam o' Shan- 
ter." The last wish of Faustus was Helen of Troy. 
Mephistophilis fetches her, and Faustus exclaims : 



MARLOWE 51 

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, 
And burned the topless towers of Ilium ? 
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss ! 



Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips, 
And all is dross that is not Helena : 

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air 
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars." 

No sucli verses had ever been heard on the Eng- 
lish stage before, and this was one of the great 
debts our language owes to Marlowe. He first 
taught it what passion and fire were in its veins. 
The last scene of the play, in which the bond with 
Lucifer becomes payable, is nobly conceived. Here 
the verse rises to the true dramatic sympathy of 
which I spoke. It is swept into the vortex of 
Faust's eddying thought, and seems to writhe and 
gasp in that agony of hopeless despair : — 

"Ah, Faustus, 
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, 
And then thou must be damned perpetually ! 
Stand still, ye ever-moving spheres of Heaven, 
That time may cease and midnight never come ; 
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make 
Perpetual day ; or let this hour be but 
A year, a month, a week, a natural day. 
That Faustus may repent and save his soul ! 
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, 
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. 
Oh, I '11 leap up to my God ! Who pulls me down ? 
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament ! 
One drop would save my soul — half a drop ; ah, my Christ ! 
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ ! 
Yet will I call on Him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer ! 
Where is it now ? 'T is gone ; and see where God 
Stretch eth out His arm and bends His ireful brows ! 



62 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me, 
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God ! 
No ? No ? 

Then will I headlong- run into the earth. 
Earth, g-ape ! Oh no, it will not harbor me ! 

Ah ! half the hour is past ; 't will all be past anon. 

O God, 

If Thou wilt not have mercy on my soul. 

Yet, for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransomed me, 

Impose some end to my incessant pain ; 

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years — 

A hundred thousand — and at last be saved ! 

Oh, no end 's limited to damned souls. 

Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul ? 

Or why was this immortal that thou hast ? 

Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true. 

This soul should fly from me, and I be changed 

Unto some brutish beast ! All beasts are happy. 

For when they die 

Their souls are soon dissolved in elements ; 

But mine must live still to be plagued in Hell ! 

Cursed be the parents that engendered me ! 

No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer, 

That hath deprived thee of the joys of Heaven. 

Oh, it strikes ! it strikes ! Now, body, turn to air, 

Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to Hell. 

soul, be changed to little waterdrops 
And fall into the ocean ; ne'er be found ! 
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me ! 
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile. 
Ugly Hell, gape not. Come not, Lucifer ! 

1 '11 burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis ! " 

It remains to say a few words of Marlowe's poem 
of " Hero and Leander," for in translating it from 
Musaeus he made it his own. It has great ease and 
fluency of versification, and many lines as perfect 
in their concinnity as those of Pope, but infused 
with a warmer coloring and a more poetic fancy. 
Here is foimd the verse that Shakespeare quotes 



MARLOWE 53 

somewhere. The second verse of the following 
couplet has precisely Pope's cadence : — 

" Unto her was he led, or rather drawn, 
By those white limbs that sparkled through the lawn." 

It was from this poem that Keats caught the in- 
spiration for his "Endymion." A single passage 
will serve to prove this : — 

" So fair a church as this had Venus none : 
The walls were of discolored jasper stone, 
Wherein was Proteus carved ; and overhead 
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread, 
Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung, 
And with the other wine from grapes outwrung." 

Milton, too, learned from Marlowe the charm of 
those long sequences of musical proper names 
of which he made such effective use. Here are 
two passages which Milton surely had read and 
pondered : — 

" So from the East unto the furthest West 
Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm ; 
The galleys and those pilling brigantines 
That yearly sail to the Venetian gulf, 
And hover in the straits for Christians' wreck, 
Shall lie at anchor in the isle^Asant, 
Until the Persian fleet and men of war 
Sailing along the Oriental sea 
Have fetched about the Indian continent, 
Even from Persepolis to Mexico, 
And thence unto the straits of Jubaltar." 

This is still more Miltonic : — 

" As when the seaman sees the Hyades 
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds, 
Auster and Aquilon with winged steeds. 



All fearful folds his sails and sounds the main." 



54 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Spenser, too, loved this luxur}^ of sound, as he 
shows in such passages as this : — 

" Now was Aldebaran uplifted high 
Above the starry Cassiopeia's chair." 

And I fancy he would have put him there to make 
music, even had it been astronomically impossible, 
but he never strung such names in long necklaces, 
as Marlowe and Milton were fond of doing. 

Was Marlowe, then, a great poet ? For such a 
title he had hardly range enough of power, hardly 
reach enough of thought. But surely he had some 
of the finest qualities that go to the making of a 
great poet ; and his poetic instinct, when he had 
time to give himself wholly over to its guidance, 
was unerring. I say when he had time enough, for 
he, too, like his fellows, was forced to make the 
daily task bring in the daily bread. We have seen 
how fruitful his influence has been, and perhaps 
his genius could have no surer warrant than that 
the charm of it lingered in the memory of poets, 
for theirs is the memory of mankind. If we allow 
him genius, what need to ask for more ? And per- 
haps it would be only to him among the group of 
dramatists who surromided Shakespeare that we 
should allow it. He was the herald that dropped 
dead in announcing the victory in whose fruits he 
was not to share. 



Ill 

WEBSTER 

In my first lecture I spoke briefly of the defi- 
ciency in respect of Form which characterizes nearly 
all the dramatic literature of which we are taking a 
summary survey, till the example of Shakespeare 
and the precepts of Ben Jonson wrought their 
natural effect. Teleology, or the argument from 
means to end, the argument of adaptation, is not so 
much in fashion in some spheres of thought and 
speculation as it once was, but here it applies ad- 
mirably. We have a piece of work, and we know 
the maker of it. The next question that we ask 
ourselves is the very natural one — how far it shows 
marks of intelligent design. In a play we not only 
expect a succession of scenes, but that each scene 
should lead, by a logic more or less stringent, if 
not to the next, at any rate to something that is to 
follow, and that all should contribute their frac- 
tion of impulse towards the inevitable catastrophe. 
That is to say, the structure should be organic, with 
a necessary and harmonious connection and rela- 
tion of parts, and not merely mechanical, with an 
arbitrary or haphazard joining of one part to an- 
other. It is in the former sense alone that any 
production can be called a work of art. 

And when we apply the word Form in this sense 
to some creation of the mind, we imply that there 



56 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

is a life, or, what is still better, a soul in it. That 
there is an intimate relation, or, at any rate, a close 
analogy, between Form in this its highest attribute 
and Imagination, is evident if we remember that 
the Imagination is the shaping faculty. This is, in- 
deed, its preeminent function, to which all others 
are subsidiary. Shakespeare, with his usual depth 
of insight and the precision that comes of it, tells 
us that " imagination bodies forth the forms of 
things unknown." In his maturer creations there 
is generally some central thought about which the 
action revolves like a moon, carried along with it 
in its appointed orbit, and j)ermitted the gambol of 
a Ptolemaic epicycle now and then. But the word 
Form has also more limited applications, as, for ex- 
ample, when we use it to imply that nice sense of 
proportion and adaptation which results in Style. 
We may apply it even to the structure of a verse, 
or of a short poem in which every advantage has 
been taken of the material employed, as in Keats 's 
" Ode to a Grecian Urn," which seems as perfect 
in its outline as the thing it so lovingly celebrates. 
In all these cases there often seems also to be some- 
thing intuitive or instinctive in the working of cer- 
tain faculties of the poet, and to this we uncon- 
sciously testify when we call it genius. But in the 
technic of this art, perfection can be reached only 
by long training, as was evident in the case of Cole- 
ridge. Of course, without the genius all the train- 
ing in the world will produce only a mechanical 
and lifeless result ; but even if the genius is there, 
there is nothing too seemingly trifling to deserve 



WEBSTER 5T 

its study. The " Elegy in a Country Church-yard " 
owes much of the charm that makes it precious, 
even with those who perhaps undervalue its senti- 
ment, to Gray's exquisite sense of the value of 
vowel sounds. 

Let us, however, come down to what is within 
the reach and under the control of talent and of a 
natural or acquired dexterity. And such a thing 
is the plot or arrangement of a play. In this part 
of their business our older playwrights are espe- 
cially unskilled or negligent. They seem perfectly 
content if they have a story which they can divide 
at proper intervals by acts and scenes, and bring at 
last to a satisfactory end by marriage or murder, as 
the case may be. A certain variety of characters 
is necessary, but the motives that compel and con- 
trol them are almost never sufficiently apparent. 
And this is especially true of the dramatic motives, 
as distinguished from the moral. The personages 
are brought in to do certain things and perform 
certain purposes of the author, but too often there 
seems to be no special reason why one of them 
should do this or that more than another. They 
are servants of all work, ready to be villains or 
fools at a moment's notice if required. The obli- 
ging simplicity with which they walk into traps 
which everybody can see but themselves, is some- 
times almost delightful in its absurdity. Ben Jon- 
son was perfectly familiar with the traditional prin- 
ciples of construction. He tells us that the fable 
of a drama (by which he means the plot or action) 
should have a beginning, a middle, and an end ; 



58 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

and that " as a body without proportion cannot be 
goodly, no more can the action, either in comedy 
or tragedy, without his fit bounds.'' But he goes 
on to say " that as every bound, for the nature of 
the subject, is esteemed the best that is largest, 
till it can increase no more ; so it behoves the ac- 
tion in tragedy or comedy to be let grow till the 
necessity ask a conclusion ; wherein two things are 
to be considered — first, that it exceed not the 
compass of one day ; next, that there be place left 
for digression and art." The weakness of our ear- 
lier playwrights is that they esteemed those bounds 
best that were largest, and let their action grow till 
they had to stop it. 

Many of Shakespeare's contemporary poets must 
have had every advantage that he had in practical 
experience of the stage, and all of them had proba- 
bly as familiar an intercourse with the theatre as he. 
But what a difference between their manner of con- 
structing a play and his ! In all his dramatic works 
his skill in this is more or less apparent. In the 
best of them it is unrivalled. From the first scene 
of them he seems to have beheld as from a tower 
the end of aU. In " Eomeo and Juliet," for exam- 
ple, he had his story before him, and he follows it 
closely enough ; but how naturally one scene is 
linked to the next, and one event leads to another ! 
If this play were meant to illustrate anything, it 
would seem to be that our lives were ruled by 
chance. Yet there is nothing left to chance in the 
action of the play, which advances with the unvac 
illating foot of destiny. And the characters are 



WEBSTER ^^ 

made to subordinate themselves to the interests of 
the play as to something in which they have all a 
common concern. With the greater part of the 
secondary dramatists, the characters seem bke un- 
practised people trying to walk the deck of a ship 
in rough weather, who start for everywhere to brmg 
up anywhere, and are hustled against each other in 
the most inconvenient way. It is only when the 
plot is very simple and straightforward that there 
is any chance of smooth water and of things gomg 
on without falling foul of each other. Was it only 
that Shakespeare, in choosing his themes, had a 
keener perception of the dramatic possibilities ot a 
story ■> Tills is very likely, and it is certam that 
he preferred to take a story ready to his hand 
rather than invent one. AH the good stones, in- 
deed, seem to have invented themselves in the most 
obliging manner somewhere in the morning of the 
world, and to have been camp-followers when the 
famous march of mind set out from the farthest 
East. But where he invented his plot, as m the 
" Midsummer Night's Dream " and the " Tempest, 
he is careful to have it as little comphcated with 
needless incident as possible. 

These thoughts were suggested to me by the 
gratuitous miscellaneousness of plot (if I may so 
call it) in some of the plays of John Webster, con- 
cerning whose works I am to say something this 
evening, a complication made still more puzzling 
by the motiveless conduct of many of the charac- 
ters When he invented a plot of his own, as in 
his comedy of "The Devil's Law Case," the improb- 



60 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

abilities become insuperable, by which I mean 
that they are such as not merely the understanding 
but the imagination cannot get over. For mere 
common-sense has little to do with the affair. 
Shakespeare cared little for anachronisms, or 
whether there were seaports in Bohemia or not, 
any more than Calderon cared that gunpowder had 
not been invented centuries before the Christian 
era when he wanted an arquebus to be fired, be- 
cause the noise of a shot would do for him what a 
silent arrow would not do. But, if possible, the 
understanding should have as few difficulties put 
in its way as possible. Shakespeare is careful to 
place his Ariel in the not yet wholly disenchanted 
Bermudas, near which Sir John Hawkins had seen 
a mermaid not many years before, and lays the 
scene for his Oberon and Titania in the dim re- 
moteness of legendary Athens, though his clowns 
are unmistakably English, and though he knew as 
well as we do that Puck was a British goblin. In 
estimating material improbability as distinguished 
from moral, however, we should give our old dram- 
atists the benefit of the fact that all the world was 
a great deal farther away in those days than in 
ours, when the electric telegraph puts our button 
into the grip of whatever commonplace our planet 
is capable of producing. 

Moreover, in respect of Webster as of his fel- 
lows, we must, in order to understand them, first 
naturalize our minds in their world. Chapman 
makes Byron say to Queen Elizabeth : — 



WEBSTER 61 

" These stars, 
Whose influences for this latitude 
Distilled, and wrought in with this temperate air, 
And this division of the elements, 

Have with your reign brought forth more worthy spirits 
For counsel, valour, height of wit, and art, 
Than any other region of the earth. 
Or were brought forth to all your ancestors." 

And this is apt to be the only view we take of that 
Golden Age, as we call it fairly enough in one, and 
that, perhaps, the most superficial, sense. But it 
was in many ways rude and savage, an age of great 
crimes and of the ever-brooding suspicion of great 
crimes. Queen Elizabeth herseK was the daughter 
of a king as savagely cruel and irresponsible as the 
Grand Turk. It was an age that in Italy could 
breed a Cenci, and in France could tolerate the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew as a legitimate stroke 
of statecraft. But when we consider whether crime 
be a fit subject for tragedy, we must distinguish. 
Merely as crime, it is vulgar, as are the waxen im- 
ages of murderers with the very rope round their 
necks with which they were hanged. Crime be- 
comes then really tragic when it merely furnishes 
the theme for a profound psychological study of 
motive and character. The weakness of Webster's 
two greatest plays lies in this — that crime is pre- 
sented as a spectacle, and not as a means of looking 
into our own hearts and fathoming our own con- 
sciousness. 

The scene of " The Devil's Law Case " is Na- 
ples, then a viceroy alty of Sj)ain, and our ancestors 
thought anything possible in Italy. Leonora, a 



62 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

widow, has a son and daughter, Romelio and Jo- 
lenta. Romelio is a rich and prosperous merchant. 
Jolenta is secretly betrothed to Contarino, an ap- 
parently rather spendthrift young nobleman, who 
has already borrowed large sums of money of Ro- 
melio on the security of his estates. Romelio is 
bitterly opposed to his marrying Jolenta, for rea- 
sons known only to himself ; at least, no reason ap- 
pears for it, except that the play could not have 
gone on without it. The reason he assigns is that 
he has a grudge against the nobility, though it ap- 
pears afterwards that he himself is of noble birth, 
and asserts his equality with them. When Conta- 
rino, at the opening of the play, comes to urge his 
suit, and asks him how he looks upon it, Romelio 
answers : — 

" Believe me, sir, as on the principal column 
To advance our house ; why, you bring- honor with you, 
Which is the soul of wealth. I shall be proud 
To live to see my little nephews ride 
O' the upper hand of their uncles, and the daughters 
Be ranked by heralds at solemnities 
Before the mother ; and all this derived 
From your nobility. Do not blame me, sir. 
If I be taken with 't exceedingly ; 
For this same honor with us citizens 
Is a thing we are mainly fond of, especially 
When it comes without money, which is very seldom. 
But as you do perceive my present temper. 
Be sure I 'm yours." 

And of this Contarino was sure, the irony of Ro- 
melio's speech having been so delicately conveyed 
that he was unable to perceive it. 

A little earlier in this scene a speech is put into 



WEBSTER 63 

the moutli of Romelio so characteristic of Webster's 
more sententious style that I will repeat it : — 

" O, my lord, lie not idle : 
The chiefest action for a man of great spirit 
Is never to be out of action. We should think 
The soul was never put into the body, 
Which has so many rare and curious pieces 
Of mathematical motion, to stand still. 
Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds ; 
I' th' trenches for the soldiers, i' th' wakeful study 
For the scholar, in the furrows of the sea 
For men of our profession, of all which 
Arise and spring up honour." 

This recalls to mind the speech of Ulysses to 
Achilles in " Troilus and Cressida," a piece of elo- 
quence which, for the impetuous charge of serried 
argument and poetic beauty of illustration, grows 
more marvellous with every reading. But it is 
hardly fair to any other poet to let him remind us 
of Shakespeare. 

Contarino, on leaving Romelio, goes to Leonora, 
the mother, who immediately conceives a violent 
passion for him. He, by way of a pretty compli- 
ment, tells her that he has a suit to her, and that 
it is for her picture. By this he meant her daugh- 
ter, but with the flattering implication that you 
would not know the parent from the child. Leo- 
nora, of course, takes him literally, is gracious ac- 
cordingly, and Contarino is satisfied that he has 
won her consent also. This scene gives occasion 
for a good example of Webster's more playful style, 
which is perhaps worth quoting. Still apropos of 
her portrait, Leonora says : — 



64 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

" You will enjoin me to a strange punishment. 
With what a compelled face a woman sits 
While she is drawing ! I have noted divers 
Either to feign smiles, or suck in the lips 
To have a little mouth ; ruffle the cheeks 
To have the dimple seen ; and so disorder 
The face with affectation, at next sitting 
It has not been the same : I have known others 
Have lost the entire fashion of their face 
In half an hour's sitting. . . . 
But indeed 
If ever I would have mine drawn to th' life, 
I 'd have a painter steal it at such a time 
I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers ; 
There 's then a heavenly beauty in 't ; the soul 
Moves in the superficies." 

The poet shows one of his habitual weaknesses 
here in being so far tempted by the chance of say- 
ing a pretty thing as to make somebody say it who 
naturally would not. There is really a worse waste 
than had it been thrown away. I am inclined to 
think men as vain about their portraits as Leonora 
makes women to be, or else the story of Cromwell's 
wart woidd not be so famous. However, Contarino 
goes away satisfied with the result of his embassy^ 
saying to himself : — 

" She has got some intelligence how I intend to marry 
Her daughter, and ingenuously perceived 
That by her picture, which I begged of her, 
I meant the fair Jolenta." 

There is no possible reason why he should not 
have conveyed this intelligence to her himself, and 
Leonora must have been ingenious indeed to divine 
it, except that the plot would not allow it. Pre- 
sently another match is found for Jolenta in Ercole, 



WEBSTER 65 

which Romelio favors for reasons again known only 
to himseK, though he is a noble quite as much as 
Contarino. Ercole is the pattern of a chivalrous 
gentleman. Though he at once falls in love with 
Jolenta, according to Marlowe's rule that " he 
never loved that loved not at first sight," and 
though Romelio and the mother both urge the im- 
mediate signing of the contract, he refuses. 

"Lady, I will do 
A manly office for you ; I will leave you 
To th' freedom of your own soul ; may it move 
Whither Heaven and you please ! 



I '11 leave you, excellent lady, and withal 

Leave a heart with you so entirely yours 

That I protest, had I the least of hope 

To enjoy you, though I were to wait the time 

That scholars do in taking their degree 

In the noble arts, 'twere nothing: howsoe'er, 

He parts from you, that will depart from life 

To do you any service ; and so humbly 

I take my leave." 

Never, I think, was more delicate compliment 
paid to a woman than in that fine touch which puts 
the service of her on a level with the " noble arts." 
On this ground of sentiment idealized by devotion, 
Webster always moves with the assured ease and 
dignified familiarity of a thorough gentleman. 

Ercole's pretension to the hand of Jolenta leads, 
of course, to a duel with Contarino. They had 
been fellow-students together at Padua, and the 
scene in which the preliminaries of the duel are ar- 
ranged is pitched on as nobly grave a key as can be 
conceived. Lamb very justly calls it " the model 



66 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

of a well-arranged and gentlemanlike difference." 
There is no swagger and no bravado in it, as is too 
commonly apt to be the case in the plays of that 
age. There is something Spanish in its dignity. 
To show what its tone is, I quote the opening. It 
is Contarino who first speaks. 

"Sir, my love to you has proclaimed you one 
Whose word was still led hy a noble thought, 
And that thought followed by as fair a deed. 
Deceive not that opinion. We were students 
At Padua together, and have long 
To th' world's eye shown like friends ; was it hearty 
On your part to me ? 

Ere. Unfeigned. 

Con. You are false 
To the good thought I held of you, and now 
Join the worst part of man to you, your malice, 
To uphold that falsehood : sacred innocence 
Is fled your bosom. Signior, I must tell you, 
To draw the picture of unkindness truly 
Is to express two that have dearly loved 
And fall'n at variance ; 't is a wonder to me, 
Knowing my interest in the fair Jolenta, 
That you should love her. 

Ere. Compare her beauty and my youth together 
And you will find the fair effects of love 
No miracle at all." 

They fight, and both fall mortally wounded, as 
it is supposed. Ercole is reported dead, and Con- 
tarino dying, having first made a will in favor of 
Jolenta. Romelio, disguised as a Jew, to avenge 
the injury to himself in the death of Ercole, and to 
make sure that Contarino shall not survive to alter 
his will, gets admission to him by bribing his sur- 
geons, and stabs him. This saves his life by re- 
opening the old wound and letting forth its virus. 



WEBSTER 67 

Of course both he and Ercole recover, and both 
conceal themselves, though why, it is hard to say, 
except that they are not wanted again till towards 
the end of the play. Romelio, unaware of his 
mother's passion for Contarino, tells her, as a piece 
of good news she will be glad to hear, of what he 
has done. She at once resolves on a most horrible 
and unnatural revenge. Her speech has a kind 
of savage grandeur in it which Webster was fond of 
showing, for he rightly felt that it was his strongest 
quality, though it often tempted him too far, till it 
became bestial in its ferocity. It is to be observed 
that he was on his guard here, and gives us a hint, 
as you will see, in a highly imaginative passage, 
that Leonora's brain was turning : — 

" I will make you chief mourner, believe it. 
Never was woe like mine. 0, that miy care 
And absolute study to preserve his life 
Should be his absolute ruin ! Is he gone, then ? 
There is no plague i' th' world can be compar'd 
To impossible desire ; for they are plagu'd 
In the desire itself. Never, 0, never 
Shall I behold him living, in whose life 
I liv'd far sweetlier than in mine own ! 
A precise curiosity has undone me : why did I not 
Make my love known directly ? 'T had not been 
Beyond example for a matron 
To affect i' th' honourable way of marriage 
So youthful a person. 0, I shall run mad ! 
For as we love our youngest children best, 
So the last fruit of our affection. 
Wherever we bestow it, is most strong, 
Most violent, most unresistible. 
Since 't is indeed our latest harvest-home, 
Last merriment 'fore winter ; and we widows, 
As men report of our best picture-makers, 



68 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

We love the piece we are in hand with better 

Than all the excellent work we have done before. 

And my son has depriv'd me of all this ! Ha, my son I 

I '11 be a Fury to him ; like an Amazon lady, 

I 'd cut off this right pap that gave him suck, 

To shoot him dead. I '11 no more tender him. 

Than had a wolf stol'n to my teat i' the night 

And robb'd me of my milk; nay, such a creature 

I should love better far. Ha, ha ! what say you ? 

I do talk to somewhat, methinks ; it may be 

My evil Genius. Do not the bells ring ? 

I have a strange noise in my head : 0, fly in pieces ! 

Come, age, and wither me into the malice 

Of those that have been happy ! Let me have 

One property more than the devil of hell ; 

Let me envy the pleasure of youth heartily ; 

Let me in this life fear no kind of ill, 

That have no good to hope for ; let me die 

In the distraction of that worthy princess 

Who loathed food, and sleep, and ceremony, 

For thought of losing that brave gentlem.an 

She would fain have sav'd, had not a false conveyance 

Express'd him stubborn-hearted. Let me sink 

Where neither man nor memory may ever find me." 

Webster forestalled Balzac by two hundred years 
in what he says of a woman's last passion. The 
revenge on which she fixes is, at the cost of her 
own honor, to declare Romelio illegitimate. She 
says that his true father was one Crispiano, a Span- 
ish gentleman, the friend of her husband. Natu- 
rally, when the trial comes on, Crispiano, unrecog- 
nized, turns up in court as the very judge who is to 
preside over it. He first gets the year of the al- 
leged adultery fixed by the oath of Leonora and 
her maid, and then professes to remember that 
Crispiano had told him of giving a portrait of him- 
self to Leonora, has it sent for, and, revealing him- 
self, identifies himself by it, saying, prettily enough 



WEBSTER ^^ 

(those old dramatists have a way of stating dry 
facts so f ancifuUy as to make them blossom, as it 
were), 

" Behold, I am the shadow of this shadow." 

He then proves an alibi at the date in question 
by his friend Ariosto, whom meanwhile he has just 
promoted to the bench in his own place, by virtue 
of a convenient commission from the king of Spain, 
which he has in his pocket. At the end of the 
trial, the counsel for Leonora exclaimed : — 

■" Ud's foot, we're spoiled ; 
Why, our client is proved an honest woman ! " 

Which I cite only because it reminds me to say 
that Webster has a sense of humor more dehcate, 
and a way of showing it less coarse, than most of 
his brother dramatists. Meanwliile Webster saves 
Romelio from being hateful beyond possibility of 
condonation by making him perfectly fearless. He 
says finely : — 

" I cannot set myself so many fathom 
Beneath the height of my true heart as fear. 

Let me continue 
An honest man, which I am very certain 
A coward can never be." 

The last words convey an important and even 
profound truth. And let me say now, once for all, 
that Webster abounds, more than any of his con- 
temporaries except Chapman, in these metaphysical 
apothegms, and that he introduces them naturally, 
whHe Chapman is too apt to drag them in by the 



70 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

ears. Here is another as good, I am tempted to 
say, as many of Shakespeare's, save only in avarice 
of words. When Leonora is suborning Winifred, 
her maid, to aid her in the plot against her son, she 
says : — 

" Come hither: 
I have a weighty secret to impart, 
But I would have thee first confirm to me 
How I may trust that thou canst keep my counsel 
Beyond death. 

Win. Why, mistress, 't is your only way 
To enjoin me first that I reveal to you 
The worst act I e'er did in all my life ; 
One secret so shall bind another. 

Leon. Thou instruct'st me 

Most ingeniously ; for indeed it is not fit, 
Where any act is plotted that is naught, 
Any of counsel to it should be good ; 
And, in a thousand ills have happ'd i' th' world. 
The intelligence of one another's shame 
Hath wrought far more effectually than the tie 
Of conscience or religion." 

The plot has other involutions of so unpleasant 
a nature now through change of manners that I 
shall but allude to them. They are perhaps in- 
tended to darken Romelio's character to the proper 
Websterian sable, but they certainly rather make 
an eddy in the current of the action than hasten it 
as they should. 

I have briefly analyzed this play because its plot 
is not a bad sample of a good many others, and be- 
cause the play itself is less generally kno^vn than 
Webster's deservedly more famous "Vittoria Co- 
rombona" and the "Duchess of Malfi." Before 
coming to these, I will mention his " Appius and 



WEBSTER 71 

Virginia," a spirited, well-constructed play (for 
here the simplicity of the incidents kept him with- 
in bounds), and, I think, as good as any other 
founded on a Roman story except Shakespeare's. 
It is of a truly Roman temper, and perhaps, there- 
fore, incurs a suspicion of being cast iron. Web- 
ster, like Ben Jonson, knew, theoretically at least, 
how a good play should be put together. In his 
preface to " The Devil's Law-Case " he says : " A 
great part of the grace of this lay in action ; yet 
can no action ever be gracious, where the decency 
of the language and ingenious structure of the 
scene arrive not to make up a perfect harmony." 

'' The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona," 
produced in 1612, and the " Duchess of Malfi," in 
1616, are the two works by which Webster is re- 
membered. In these plays there is almost some- 
thing like a fascination of crime and horror. Our 
eyes dazzle with them. The imagination that con- 
ceived them is a ghastly imagination. Hell is 
naked before it. It is the imagination of night- 
mare, but of no vulgar nightmare. I would rather 
call it fantasy than imagination, for there is some- 
thing fantastic in its creations, and the fantastic is 
dangerously near to the grotesque, while the imagi- 
nation, where it is most authentic, is most serene. 
Even to elicit strong emotion, it is the still small 
voice that is most effective ; nor is Webster un- 
aware of this, as I shall show presently. Both 
these plays are full of horrors, yet they do move 
pity and terror strongly also. We feel that we are 
under the control of a usurped and illegitimate 



72 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

power, but it is power. I remember seeing a pic- 
ture in some Belgian church where an angel makes 
a motion to arrest the hand of the Almighty just as 
it is stretched forth in the act of the creation. If 
the angel foresaw that the world to be created was 
to be such a one as Webster conceived, we can 
fully understand his impulse. Through both plays 
there is a vapor of fresh blood and a scent of 
church-yard mould in the air. They are what chil- 
dren call creejyy. Ghosts are ready at any moment : 
they seem, indeed, to have formed a considerable 
part of the population in those days. As an in- 
stance of the almost ludicrous way in which they 
were emj^loyed, take this stage direction from Chap- 
man's " Kevenge of Bussy d' Ambois." " Music, 
and the ghost of Bussy enters leading the ghosts of 
the Guise, Monsieur, Cardinal Guise, and Chatil- 
lon ; they dance about the body and exeunt ^ It 
is fair to say that Webster's ghosts are far from 
comic. 

Let me briefly analyze " The White Devil." Vit- 
toria Corombona, a beautiful woman, is married to 
Camillo, whom she did not love. She becomes the 
paramour of the Duke of Brachiano, whose Duch- 
ess is the sister of Francesco de' Medici and of 
Cardinal Monticelso. One of the brothers of Vit- 
toria, riamineo, is secretary to Brachiano, and con- 
trives to murder Camillo for them. Vittoria, as 
there is" no sufficient proof to fix the charge of 
murder upon her, is tried for incontinency, and 
sent to a house of Convertites, whence Brachiano 
spirits her away, meaning to marry her. In the 



WEBSTER. 73 

mean while Brachiano's Duchess is got out of 
the way by poison ; the lips of his portrait, which 
she kisses every night before going to bed, having 
been smeared with a deadly drug to that end. 
There is a Count Ludovico, who had proffered an 
unholy love to the Duchess, but had been repulsed 
by her, and he gladly offers himself as the minister 
of vengeance. Just as Brachiano is arming for a 
tournament arranged for the purpose by his bro- 
ther-in-law, the Duke of Florence, Ludovico poi- 
sons his helmet, so that he shortly dies in torture. 
Ludovico then murders Vittoria, Zanche, her Moor- 
ish maid, and Flamineo, and is himself shot by the 
guards of the young Duke Giovanni, son of Bra- 
chiano, who break in upon him just as he has com- 
pleted his butchery. There are but four characters 
in the play unstained with crime — Cornelia, Vit- 
toria's mother ; Marcello, her younger son ; the 
Duchess of Brachiano ; and her son, the young 
Duke. There are three scenes in the play remark- 
able for their effectiveness, or for their power in 
different ways — the trial scene of Vittoria, the 
death scene of Brachiano, and that of Vittoria. 
There is another — the burial of Marcello — which 
is pathetic as few men have known how to be so 
simply and with so little effort as Webster. 

" Fran, de Med. Your reverend mother 
Is grown a very old woman in two hours. 
I found them winding of Mareello's corse ; 
And there is such a solemn melody, 
'Tween doleful song-s, tears, and sad elegies — 
Such as old grandams watching by the dead 
Were wont to outwear the nights with — that, believe me. 



74 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

I had no eyes to guide me forth the room, 
They were so o'ercharg'd with water. 

Flam. I will see them. 

Fran, de' Med. 'T were much uncharitj in you, for your sight 
Will add unto their tears. 

Flam. I will see them : 
They are behind the traverse ; I '11 discover 
Their superstitious howling. 

[Draws the curtain. Cornelia, Zanche, and three other 
Ladies discovered winding Marcello's corse. A song. 

Cor. This rosemary is withered ; pray, get fresh ; 
I would have these herbs grow up in his g^ave 
WTien I am dead and rotten. Eeach the bays; 
I *11 tie a garland here about liis head ; 
'T will keep my boy from lightning. This sheet 
I have kept this twenty year, and every day 
Hallow'd it with my prayers. I did not think 
He should have wore it. 

Zanche. Look you who are yonder. 

Cor. 0, reach me the flowers. 

Zanche. Her ladyship 's foolish. 

Lady. Alas, her grief 
Hath turn'd her child again ! 

Cor. You 're very welcome : 
There 's rosemary for you ; and rue for you ; 

[To Flamineo. 
Heart' s-ease for you ; I pray make much of it: 
I have left more for myself. 

Fran, de' Med. Lady, who 's this ? 

Cor. You are, I take it, the grave-maker. 

Flam. So. 

Zanche. 'T is Flamineo. 

Cor. Will you make me such a fool ? Here 's a white hand : 
Can blood so soon be wash'd out ? Let me see : 
When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops, 
And the strange cricket i' the oven sings and hops, 
When yellow spots do on your hands appear. 
Be certain then you of a corse shall hear. 
Out upon "t, how 't is speckled ! h'as handled a toad, sure. 
Cowslip- water is good for the memory : 
Pray, buy me three ounces of 't. 



WEBSTER 15 

Flam. I would I were from hence. 
Cor. Do you hear, sir ? 
1 11 give you a saying which my grandmother 
Was wont, when she heard the bell toll; to sing o'er 
Unto her lut€. 

Flam. Do, an you will, do. 

Cor. * Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren, 

[Cornelia doth this in several forms of distraction. 
Since o'er shady groves they hover, 
And with leaves and flowers do cover 
The friendless bodies of imbxmed men. 
Call unto his funeral dole 
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole. 
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm, 
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm, 
But keep the wolf far thence, that 's foe to men. 
For with his nails he '11 dig them up again.' 
They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel ; 
But I have an answer for them : 

' Let holy church receive him duly, 
Since he paid the church-tithes truly.' 
His wealth Ls summ'd, and this is all his store ; 
This poor men get, and great men get no more. 
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop. 
Bless you all, good people I 

[Exeunt Cornelia. Zanche, and Ladies. 
Flam. I have a strange thing in me, to the which 
I cannot give a name, without it be 
Compassion. I pray, leave me." 



In the trial scene tlie defiant haiightine-ss of Yit- 
toria, entrenched in her illu.striou.s birth, against 
the taunts of the Cardinal, making one think of 
BroTN-ning's Ottima, "magnificent in sin," excites a 
RATnpathy which must check itself if it would not 
become admiration. She dies with the same un- 
conquerable spirit, not shaming in death at least 
the blood of the Vitelli that ran in her veins. As 



76 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

to Flamineo, I think it plain that but for lago 
he would never have existed ; and it has always 
interested me to find in Webster more obvious 
reminiscences of Shakespeare, without conscious 
imitation of him, than in any other dramatist of the 
time. Indeed, the style of Shakespeare cannot be 
imitated, because it is the expression of his individ- 
ual genius. Coleridge tells us that he thought he 
was copying it when writing the tragedy of " Re- 
morse," and found, when all was done, that he had 
reproduced Massinger instead. lago seems to me 
one of Shakespeare's most extraordinary divina- 
tions. He has embodied in him the corrupt Italian 
intellect of the Renaissance. Flamineo is a more 
degraded example of the same type, but without 
lago's motives of hate and revenge. He is a mere 
incarnation of selfish sensuality. These two trage- 
dies of " Yittoria Corombona " and the " Duchess 
of Malfi " are, I should say, the most vivid pictures 
of that repulsively fascinating period that we have 
in English. Alfred de Musset's " Lorenzaccio " is, 
however, far more terrible, because there the hor- 
ror is moral wholly, and never physical, as too 
often in Webster. 

There is something in Webster that reminds me 
of Victor Hugo. There is the same confusion at 
times of what is big with what is great, the same 
fondness for the merely spectacular, the same in- 
sensibility to repulsive details, the same indifference 
to the probable or even to the natural, the same 
leaning toward the grotesque, the same love of 
effect at whatever cost ; and there is also the same 



WEBSTER 11 

impressiveness of result. Whatever other effect 
Webster may produce upon us, he never leaves us 
indifferent. We may blame, we may criticise, as 
much as we will ; we may say that all this ghastli- 
uess is only a trick of theatrical blue-light ; we 
shudder, and admire nevertheless. We may say he 
is melodramatic, that his figures are magic-lantern 
pictures that waver and change shape with the cur- 
tain on which they are thrown : it matters not ; he 
stirs us with an emotion deeper than any mere arti- 
fice could stir. 



IV 

CHAPMAN 

As I turn from one to another of the old dra- 
matists, and see how little is kno^\^i about their per- 
sonal history, I find a question continually coming 
hack, invincible as a fly with a strong sense of duty, 
which I shall endeavor to fan away by a little dis- 
cussion. This question is whether we gain or lose 
by our ignorance of the personal details of their 
history. Would it make any difference in our en- 
joyment of what they wrote, if we had the means 
of knowing that one of them was a good son, or 
the other a bad husband ? that one was a punctual 
paymaster, and that the other never paid his 
washer-woman for the lustration of the legendary 
sinoie sliirt without which he could not face a ne^r- 
lectful world, or hasten to the theatre wdth the 
manuscript of the new play for which posterity was 
to be more thankful than the manasfer? Is it a 
love of knowledge or of gossip that renders these 
private concerns so interesting to us, and makes us 
willing to intrude on the a^^^ld seclusion of the 
dead, or to flatten our noses against the windows of 
the living ? The law is more scrupulous than we 
in maintaining the inviolability of private letters. 
Are we to profit by every indiscretion, by every 



CHAPMAN 79 

breach of confidence ? Of course, in whatever the 
man himself has made a part of the record we are 
entitled to find what intimations we can of his gen- 
uine self, of the real man, veiled under the draper- 
ies of convention and circumstance, who was visible 
for so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, 
obscurely known to himself, conjectured even by 
his intimates, and a mere name to all beside. And 
yet how much do we really know even of men who 
profess to admit us to every corner of their nature 
— of Montaigne? of Rousseau? As in the box 
under the table at which the automaton chess-player 
sat, there is always a closet within that which is so 
frankly opened to us, and into this the enigma him- 
self absconds while we are staring at nothing in 
the other. Even in autobiographies, it is only by 
inadvertencies, by unconscious betrayals when the 
author is off his guard, that we make our discov- 
eries. In a man's works we read between the lines, 
not always wisely. No doubt there is an intense 
interest in watching the process by which a detec- 
tive critic like Sainte-Beuve dogs his hero or his 
victim, as the case may be, with tireless sympathy 
or vindictive sagacity, tracking out clew after clew, 
and constructing out of the life a comment on the 
works, or, again, from the works divining the char- 
acter. But our satisfaction depends upon the bias 
with which the inquisition is conducted, and, after 
assisting at this process in the case of Chateau- 
briand, for example, are we sure that we know the 
man better, or only what was morbid in the man, 
which, perhaps, it was not profitable for us to 
know ? 



80 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

But is it not after the discreditable particulars 
which excite a correspondingly discreditable curios- 
ity that we are eager, and these that we read with 
greatest zest ? So it should seem if we judged by 
the fact that biography, and especially that of men 
of letters, tends more and more towards these in- 
decent exposures. The concern of the biographer 
should be with the mind, and not with the body of 
his victim. We are willing to be taken into the 
parlor and the library, but may fairly refuse to be 
dragged down to the kitchen or to look into the 
pantry. Boswell's " Life of Johnson " does not 
come under this condemnation, being mainly a rec- 
ord of the great doctor's opinions, and, since done 
with his own consent, is almost to be oalled autobi- 
ographical. There are (pertain memoirs after read- 
ing which one blushes as if he had not only been 
peeping through a key-hole, but had been caught 
in the act. No doubt there is a fearful truth in 
Shakespeare's saying, — 

" The evil that men do lives after them," 

but I should limit it to the evil done by otherwise 
good men, for it is only in this kind of evil that 
others will seek excuse for what they are tempted 
to do, or palliation for what they have already done. 
I like to believe, and to think I see reason for be- 
lieving, that it is the good that is in men which is 
immortal, and beneficently immortal, and that the 
sooner the perishable husk in which it was envel- 
oped is suffered to perish and crumble away, the 
sooner we shall know them as they really were. I 



CHAPMAN 81 

remember how Longfellow used to laugli in liis 
kindly way when he told the story of the French 
visitor who asked him for some revelations intimes 
of his domestic life, to be published in a Paris news- 
paper. No man would have lost less by the most 
starino" light that could have been admitted to 
those sacred retreats, but he shrank instinctively 
from being an accomplice to its admission. I am 
not sure that I ought to be grateful for the probable 
identification of the Dark Lady to whom twenty-five 
of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed, much as I 
should connnend the research and acuteness that 
rendered it possible. We had, indeed, more than 
suspected that these sonnets had an address within 
the biUs of mortality, for no such red-blooded flame 
as this sometimes is ever burned on the altar of the 
Ideal. But whoever she was, she was unembodied 
so long as she was nameless, she moved about in 
a world not realized, sacred in her inaccessibility, a 
fainter image of that image of her which had been 
mirrored in the poet's eyes ; and this vulgarization 
of her into flesh and blood seems to pull down the 
sonnets from heaven's sweetest air to the turbid 
level of our earthier apprehension. Here is no 
longer an object for the upward, but for the furtive 
and sidelong glance. A gentleman once told me 
that being compelled to part with some family por- 
traits, he requested a dealer to price that of a col- 
lateral ancestress by Gainsborough. Ile^ thought 
the sum offered surprisingly small, and said so. 

" I beg your pardon for asking the question," 
said the dealer, " but business is business. You are 



82 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

not, I understand, a direct descendant of this lady. 
Was lier name ever connected with any scandal ? 
If so, I could double my offer." 

Somewhere in our in-human nature there must 
be an appetite for these unsavory personalities, but 
they are degrading in a double sense — degrading 
to him whose secret is betrayed, and to him who 
consents to share in the illicit knowledge of it. 
These things are none of our business, and yet it is 
remarkable how scrupulously exact even those most 
neglectful in their own affairs are in attending to 
the business of other people. I think, on the whole, 
that it is fortunate for us that our judgment of 
what the old dramatists did should be so little dis- 
turbed by any misinformation as to what they were, 
for to be imperfectly informed is to be misinformed, 
and even to look through contemporary eyes is to 
look through very crooked glass. Sometimes we 
may draw a pretty infallible inference as to a man's 
temperament, though not as to his character, from 
his writings. And tliis, I think, is the case with 
Chapman. 

George Chapman was born at Hitchin, in Hert- 
fordshire, in 1559 probably, though Anthony Wood 
makes him two years older, and died in London on 
the 12th of May, 1634. He was buried in the 
church-yard of St. Giles in the Fields, where the 
monument put up over him by Inigo Jones is still 
standing. He was five years older than Shake- 
speare, whom he survived for nearly twenty years, 
and fifteen years older than Ben Jonson, who out- 
lived him three years. There is good ground for 



CHAPMAN 83 

believing tliat lie studied at botli Universities, 
though he took a degree at neither. While there 
he is said to have devoted himself to the classics, 
and to have despised philosophy. This contempt, 
however, seems to me somewhat doubtful, for he is 
certainly the most obtrusively metaphysical of all 
our dramatists. After leaving the University, he is 
supposed to have travelled, which is as convenient 
a way as any other to fill up the gap of sixteen 
years between 1578, when he ended his academic 
studies, and 1594, when we first have notice of him 
in London, during which period he vanishes alto- 
gether. Whether he travelled in France and Italy 
or not, he seems to have become in some way fa- 
miliar with the languages of those countries, and 
there is some reason for thinking that he under- 
stood German also. We have two glimpses of him 
during his life in London. In 1605 he, with Jon- 
son and Marston, produced a play caUed^ '' East- 
ward Ho ! " Some " injurious reflections " on the 
Scottish nation in it angered King James, and the 
authors were imprisoned for a few days in the 
Fleet. Again, in 1606, the French ambassador, 
Beaumont, writes to his master : " I caused certain 
players to be forbid from acting ' The History of 
the Duke of Biron ; ' when, however, they saw 
that the whole court had left town, they persisted 
in acting it ; nay, they brought upon the stage the 
Queen of France and Mile, de Yerneuil. The 
former having first accosted the latter with very 
hard words, gave her a bcx on the ear. At my 
suit three of them were arrested ; but the principal 



84 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

person, the author, escaped." This was Chapman's 
tragedy, and in neither of the editions printed two 
years later does the objectionable passage appear. 
It is curious that this interesting illustration of the 
history of the English stage shoidd have been un- 
earthed from the French archives by Von Ramner' 
in his " History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth 
Centuries." 

Chapman was a man of grave character and 
regular life. We may, perhaps, infer from some 
passages in his plays that he heartily hated Puri- 
tans. There are other passages that might lead 
one to suspect him of a leaning towards Catholi- 
cism, or at least of regretting the schism of the 
Reformation. The scene of "Byron's Conspiracy" 
and " Byron's Tragedy " is laid in France, to be 
sure, in the time of Henry IV., but not to mention 
that Chapman's characters are almost always the 
mere mouth-pieces of his own thought, there is a 
fervor in the speeches to whicli I have alluded 
which gives to them an air of personal conviction. 
In " Byron's Tragedy " there is a eulogy of Philip 
II. and his policy very well worth reading by those 
who like to keep their minds judicially steady, for 
it displays no little historical insight. It certainly 
shows courage and independence to have written 
such a vindication only eighteen years after the 
Armada, and when national prejudice against Spain 
was so strong. 

Chapman's friendships are the strongest testi- 
monials we have of his character. Prince Henry, 
whose imtimely death may have changed the course 



CHAPMAN 85 

of English history, and with it that of our own, was 
his patron. So was Carr, Earl of Somerset, whom 
he did not desert in ill fortune. Inigo Jones was 
certainly his intunate friend ; and he is said to have 
been, though it seems doubtful, on terms of friendly 
intercourse with Bacon. In dedicating his " Byron's 
Conspiracy " to Sir Thomas Walsingham, he speaks 
as to an old friend. With his fellow-poets he ap- 
pears to have been generally on good terms. His 
long life covered the whole of the Elizabethan age 
of literature, and before he died he might have read 
the earlier poems of Milton. 

He wrote seven comedies and eight tragedies 
that have come down to us, and probably others 
that have perished. Nearly all his comedies are 
formless and coarse, but with what seems to me a 
kind of stiff and wiKul coarseness, as if he were 
trying to' make his personages speak in what he 
supposed to be their proper dialect, in which he 
himself was unpractised, having never learned it in 
those haunts, familiar to most of liis fellow-poets, 
where it was vernacular. His characters seem, in- 
deed, types, and he frankly proclaims himself an 
idealist in the dedication of "The Revenge of 
Bussy d'Ambois " to Sir Thomas Howard, where 
he says, " And for the authentical truth of either 
person or action, who (worth the respecting) will 
expect it in a Poem whose subject is not truth, but 
things like truth ? " Of his comedies, " All Fools " 
is by general consent the best. It is less lumpish 
than the others, and is, on the whole, lively and 
amusing. In his comedies he indulges himself 



86 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

freely in all that depreciation of woman which had 
been so long traditional with the sex which has the 
greatest share in making them what they are. But 
he thought he was being comic, and there is, on the 
whole, no more depressing sight than a naturally 
grave man under that delusion. His notion of love, 
too, is coarse and animal, or rather the notion he 
thinks proper to express through his characters. 
And yet in his comedies there are two passages, 
one in praise of love, and the other of woman, cer- 
tainly among the best of their kind. The first is a 
speech of Yalerio in " All Fools : " — 

" I tell thee love is Nature's second sun 
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines ; 
And as without the sun, the world's great eye, 
All colors, beauties, both of art and nature. 
Are given in vain to men, so without love 
All beauties bred in women are in vain. 
All virtues born in men lie buried ; 
For love informs them as the sun doth colors ; 
And as the sun, reflecting his warm beams 
Against the earth, begets all fruits and flowers, 
So love, fair shining in the inward man. 
Brings forth in him the honorable fruits 
Of valor, wit, virtue, and haughty thoughts, 
Brave resolution and divine discourse : 
O, 't is the paradise, the heaven of earth ! 
And didst thou know the comfort of two hearts 
In one delicious harmony united. 
As to enjoy one joy, think both one thought. 
Live both one life and therein double life, 

Thou wouldst abhor thy tongue for blasphemy." 

And now let me read to you a passage in praise 
of women from " The Gentleman Usher." It is 



CHAPMAN 87 

not great poetry, but it has fine touches of discrimi- 
nation both in feeling and expression : — 

" Let no man value at a little price 

A virtuous woman's counsel ; her winged spirit 
Is feathered oftentimes with heavenly words, 
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure ; 
The weaker body still the stronger soul. 

O what a treasure is a virtuous wife, 
Discreet and loving ! not one gift on earth 
Makes a man's life so highly bound to heaven ; 
She gives him double forces, to endure 
And to enjoy, by being one with him." 

Then, after comparing her with power, wealth, 
music, and delicate diet, which delight but imper- 
fectly, — 

" But a true wife both sense and soul delights, 
And mixeth not her good with any ill. 
All store without her leaves a man but poor, 
And with her poverty is exceeding store." 

Chapman himself, in a passage of his " Revenge 
of Bussy d'Ambois," condemns the very kind of 
comedy he wrote as a concession to public taste : — 

" Nay, we must now have nothing brought on stages 
But puppetry, and pied ridiculous antics ; 
Men thither come to laugh and feed fool-fat. 
Check at all goodness there as being profaned ; 
When wheresoever goodness comes, she makes 
The place still sacred, though with other feet 
Never so much 't is scandaled and polluted. 
Let me learn anything that fits a man. 
In any stables shown, as well as stages." 

Of his tragedies, the general judgment has pro- 
nounced " Byron's Conspiracy " and " Byron's Tra- 
gedy " to be the finest, though they have less genu- 



88 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

ine poetical ecstasy than his " d'Ambois." The 
" Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France," is almost 
wholly from his hand, as all its editors agree, and 
as is plain from internal evidence, for Chapman 
has some marked pecidiarities of thought and style 
which are unmistakable. Because Shirley had some 
obscure share in it, it is printed with his works, 
and omitted by the latest editor of Chapman. Yet 
it is far more characteristic of him than " Alphon- 
sus," or " Caesar and Pompey." The character of 
Chabot has a nobility less prompt to vaunt itself, 
less conscious of itself, less obstreperous, I am 
tempted to say, than is common with Chapman. 
There is one passage in the play which I will quote, 
because of the plain allusion in it to the then com- 
paratively recent fate of Lord Bacon. I am not 
sure whether it has been before remarked or not. 
The Lord Chancellor of France is impeached of the 
same crimes with Bacon. He is accused also of 
treacherous cruelty to Chabot, as Bacon was re- 
proached for ingratitude to Essex. He is sentenced 
like him to degradation of rank, to a heavy fine, 
and to imprisonment at the King's pleasure. Like 
Bacon, again, he twice confesses his gTiilt before 
sentence is passed on him, and throws himseK on 
the King's mercy : — 

" Hear me, great Judges ; if you have not lost 
For my sake all your charities, I beseech you 
Let the King' know my heart is full of penitence ; 
Calm his high-going' sea, or in that tempest 
I ruin to eternity. 0, my lords, 
Consider your own places and the helms 
You sit at ; while with all your providence 



CHAPMAN 89 

You steer, look forth and see devouring' quicksands ! 

My ambition now is punished, and my pride 

Of state and greatness falling into nothing ; 

I, that had never time, through vast employments, 

To think of Heaven, feel His revengeful wrath 

Boiling my blood and scorching up my entrails. 

There 's doomsday in my conscience, black and horrid, 

For my abuse of justice ; but no stings 

Prick with that terror as the wounds I made 

Upon the pious Admiral. Some good man 

Bear my repentance thither ; he is merciful. 

And may incline the King to stay his lightning, 

Which threatens my confusion, that my free 

Resign of title, ofi&ce, and what else 

My pride look'd at, would buy my poor life's safety ; 

Forever banish me the Court, and let 

Me waste my life far-off in some mean village." 

After the Chancellor's sentence, his secretary 
says : — 

" I could have wished him fall on softer ground 
For his good parts." 

Bacon's monument, in St. Michael's Church at St. 
Alban's, was erected by his secretary, Sir Thomas 
Meautys. Bacon did not appear at his trial ; but 
there are several striking parallels between his let- 
ters of confession and the speech you have just 
heard. 

Another posthumously published tragedy of 
Chapman's, the " Revenge for Honor," is, in con- 
ception, the most original of them all, and the plot 
seems to be of his own invention. It has great im- 
probabilities, but as the story is Oriental, we find it 
easier to forgive them. It is, on the whole, a very 
striking play, and with more variety of character 
in it than is common with Chapman. 



90 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

In general he seems to have been led to the 
choice of his heroes (and these sustain nearly the 
whole weight of the play in which they figure) by 
some half-conscious sympathy of temperament. 
They are impetuous, have an overweening self-con- 
fidence, and an orotund way of expressing it that 
fitted them perfectly to be the mouth-pieces for an 
eloquence always vehement and impassioned, some- 
times rising to a sublimity of seK-assertion. Where 
it is fine, it is nobly fine, but too often it raves itself 
into a kind of fury recalling Hamlet's word " robus- 
tious," and seems to be shouted through a speaking- 
trumpet in a gale of wind. He is especially fond of 
describing battles, and the rush of his narration is 
then like a charge of cavalry. Of his first tragedy, 
" Bussy d'Ambois," Dry den says, with that mix- 
ture of sure instinct and hasty judgment which 
makes his prose so refreshing : " I have sometimes 
wondered in the reading what has become of those 
glaring colors which amazed me in ' Bussy d'Am- 
bois ' upon the theatre ; but when I had taken up 
what I supposed a falling star, I found I had been 
cozened with a jeUy, nothing but a cold dull mass, 
which glittered no longer than it was shooting ; a 
dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, re- 
petition in abundance, looseness of expression, and 
gross hyperbole ; the sense of one line expanded 
prodigiously into ten ; and, to sum up all, incorrect 
English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and 
true nonsense ; or, at best, a scantling of wit which 
lay gasping for life and groaning beneath a heap 
of rubbish." 



CHAPMAN 91 

There is hyperbole in Chapman, and perhaps 
Dry den saw it the more readily and disliked it the 
more that his own tragedies are full of it. But 
Dryden was always hasty, not for the first time in 
speaking of Chapman. I am pretty safe in say- 
ing that he had probably only run his eye over 
"Bussy d'Ambois," and that it did not happen 
to fall on any of those finely inspired passages 
which are not only more frequent in it than in 
any other of Chapman's plays, but of a more 
purely poetical quality. Dryden was irritated by 
a consciousness of his own former barbarity of 
taste, which had led him to prefer Sylvester's 
translation of Du Bartas. What he says as to the 
success of " Bussy d'Ambois " on the stage is in- 
teresting. 

In saying that the sense of "one line is prodi- 
giously expanded into ten," Dryden certainly puts 
his finger on one of Chapman's faults. He never 
knew when to stop. But it is not true that the 
sense is expanded, if by that we are to understand 
that Chapman watered his thought to make it fill 
up. There is abundance of thought in him, and 
of very suggestive thought too, but it is not always 
in the right place. He is the most sententious of 
our poets — sententious to a fault, as we feel in 
his continuation of "Hero and Leander." In his 
annotations to the sixteenth book of his transla- 
tion of the Iliad, he seems to have been thinking 
of himself in speaking of Homer. He says: 
"And here have we ruled a ease against our plain 
and smug writers, that, because their own un- 



92 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

wieldiness will not let them rise themselves, would 
have every man grovel like them. . . . But herein 
this case is ruled against such men that they affirm 
these hyperthetical or superlative sort of expres- 
sions and illustrations are too bold and bumbasted, 
and out of that word is spun that which they call 
our fustian, their plain writing being stuff nothing 
so substantial, but such gross sowtege or hairpatch 
as every goose may eat oats through. ... But the 
chief end why I extend this annotation is only to 
entreat your note here of Homer's manner of writ- 
ing, which, to utter his after-store of matter and 
variety, is so presse and puts on with so strong a 
current that it far overruns the most laborious 
pursuer if he have not a poetical foot and Poesy's 
quick eye to guide it." 

Chapman has indeed a "great after-store of 
matter" which encumbers him, and does sometimes 
"far overrun the most laborious pursuer," but 
many a poetical foot, with Poesy's quick eye to 
guide it, has loved to follow. He has kindled an 
enthusiasm of admiration such as no other poet of 
his day except Shakespeare has been able to kin- 
dle. In this very play of "Bussy d'Ambois" 
there is a single line of which Charles Lamb says 
that " in all poetry I know nothing like it." 
When Chapman is fine, it is in a way all his own. 
There is then an incomparable amplitude in his 
style, as when, to quote a phrase from his transla- 
tion of Homer, the Lightener Zeus "lets down a 
great sky out of heaven." There is a quality of 
northwestern wind in it, which, if sometimes too 



CHAPMAN 93 

blusterous, is yet taken into the lungs with an ex- 
hilarating expansion. Hyperbole is overshooting 
the mark. No doubt Chapman sometimes did 
this, but this excess is less depressing than its 
opposite, and at least proves vigor in the bowman. 
His bow was like that of Ulysses, which none 
could bend but he, and even where the arrow went 
astray, it sings as it flies, and one feels, to use his 
own words, as if it were 

* ' the shaft 
Shot at the sun by angry Hercules, 
And into splinters by the thunder broken." 

Dryden taxes Chapman with "incorrect Eng- 
lish." This is altogether wrong. His English is 
of the best, and far less licentious than Dryden's 
own, which was also the best of its kind. Chap- 
man himself says (or makes Montsurry in "Bussy 
d'Ambois " say for him): — 

" Worthiest poets 
Shun common and plebeian forms of speech, 
Every illiberal and affected phrase, 
To clothe their matter, and together tie 
Matter and form with art and decency." 

And yet I should say that if Chapman's Eng- 
lish had any fault, it comes of his fondness for 
homespun words, and for images which, if not 
essentially vulgar, become awkwardly so by being 
forced into company where they feel themselves 
out of place. For example, in the poem which 
prefaces his Homer, full of fine thought, fitly ut- 
tered in his large way, he suddenly compares the 
worldlings he is denouncing to "an itching horse 



94 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

leaning to a block or a May-pole." He would 
liave justified himself, I suppose, by Homer's hav- 
ing compared Ajax to an ass, for I think he really* 
half believed that the spirit of Homer had entered 
into him and replaced his own. So in "Bussy," — 

" Love is a razor cleansing if well used, 
But fetcheth blood still being the least abused." 

But I think the incongruity is to be explained as 
an unconscious reaction (just as we see men of 
weak character fond of strong language) against a 
partiality he felt in himself for costly phrases. 
His fault is not the purj)le patch upon frieze, but 
the patch of frieze upon purple. In general, one 
would say that his style was impetuous like the 
man himself, and wants the calm which is the most 
convincing evidence of great power that has no 
misgivings of itself. I think Chapman figured 
forth his own ideal in his "Byron: " — 

" Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea 
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind, 
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, 
And his rapt ship run on her side so low 
That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air. 
There is no danger to a man that knows 
What life and death is ; there 's not any law 
Exceeds his knowledge ; neither is it lawful 
That he should stoop to any other law." 

Professor Minto thinks that the rival poet of 
whom Shakespeare speaks in his eighty-sixth son- 
net was Chapman, and enough confirmation of 
this theory may be racked out of dates and other 
circumstances to give it at least some probability. 



CHAPMAN 95 

However this may be, the opening line of the son- 
net contains as good a characterization of Chap- 
man's style as if it had been meant for him: — 

" Was it the proud full sail of his great verse ? " 

I have said that Chapman was generally on 
friendly terms with his brother poets. But there 
is a passage in the preface to the translation of the 
Iliad which marks an exception. He says: "And 
much less I weigh the frontless detractions of 
some stupid ignorants, that, no more knowing me 
than their beastly ends, and I ever (to my know- 
ledge) blest from their sight, whisper behind me 
vilify ings of my translation, out of the French 
affirming them, when, both in French and all other 
languages but his own, our with-all-skiU-enriched 
Poet is so poor and unpleasing that no man can 
discern from whence flowed his so generally given 
eminence and admiration." I know not who was 
intended, but the passage piques my curiosity. In 
what is said about language there is a curious par- 
allel with What Ben Jonson says of Shakespeare, 
and the "generally given eminence and admira- 
tion" applies to him also. The " with-all-skiU- 
enriched" reminds me of another peculiarity of 
Chapman — his fondness for compound words. He 
seems to have thought that he condensed more 
meaning into a phrase if he dovetailed all its words 
together by hyphens. This sometimes makes the 
verses of his translation of Homer difficult to read 
musically, if not metrically. 

Chapman has been compared with Seneca, but 



96 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

I see no likeness in their manner unless we force 
an analogy between the rather braggart Hercules 
of the one and d'Ambois of the other. The most 
famous passage in Seneca's tragedies is, I suppose, 
the answer of Medea when asked what remains to 
her in her desertion and danger: ''''Medea super- 
est.''^ This is as unlike Chapman as he is unlike 
Marlowe or Webster. His genius never could 
have compressed itseK into so laconic a casket. 
Here would have been a chance for him to dilate 
like Teneriffe or Atlas, and he would have done it 
ample justice. If ever there was a case in which 
Buffon's saying that the style is the man fitted ex- 
actly, it is in that of Chapman. Perhaps I ought 
to have used the word " mannerism " instead of 
" style," for Chapman had not that perfect control of 
his matter which " style " implies. On the contrary, 
his matter seems sometimes to do what it will with 
him, which is the characteristic of mannerism. I 
can think of no better example of both than Sterne, 
alternately victim of one and master of the other. 
His mannerism at last becomes irritating affecta- 
tion, but when he throws it off, his style is perfect 
in simplicity of rhythm. There is no more mas- 
terly page of English prose than that in the " Sen- 
timental Journey" describing the effect of the 
chorus, "O Cupid, King of Gods and Men," on 
the people of Abdera. 

As a translator, and he translated a great deal 
besides Homer, Chapman has called forth the most 
discordant opinions. It is plain from his prefaces 
and annotations that he had discussed with himself 



CHAPMAN 97 

the various theories of translation, and had chosen 
that which prefers the spirit to the letter. "I dis- 
sent," he says, speaking of his translation of the 
Iliad, "from all other translators and interpreters 
that ever essayed exposition of this miraculous 
poem, especially where the divine rapture is most 
exempt from capacity in grammarians merely and 
grammatical critics, and where the inward sense 
or soul of the sacred muse is only within eyeshot 
of a poetical spirit's inspection." This rapture, 
however, is not to be found in his translation of 
the Odyssey, he being less in sympathy with the 
quieter beauties of that exquisite poem. Cervantes 
said long ago that no poet is translatable, and he 
said truly, for his thoughts will not sing in any 
language but their own. Even where the languages 
are of common parentage, like English and Ger- 
man, the feat is impossible. Who ever saw a 
translation of one of Heine's songs into English 
from which the genius had not utterly vanished? 
We cannot translate the music ; above all, we can- 
not translate the indefinable associations which 
have gathered round the poem, giving it more 
meaning to us, perhaps, than it ever had for the 
poet himself. In turning it into our own tongue 
the translator has made it foreign to us for the 
first time. Why, we do not like to hear any one 
read aloud a poem that we love, because he trans- 
lates it into something unfamiliar as he reads. 
But perhaps it is fair, and this is sometimes for- 
gotten, to suppose that a translation is intended 
only for such as have no knowledge of the original, 



98 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

and to whom it will be a new poem. If that be 
so, there can be no question that a free repro- 
duction, a transfusion into the moulds of another 
language, with an absolute deference to its asso- 
ciations, whether of the ear or of the memory, is 
the true method. There are no more masterly illus- 
trations of this than the versions from the Greek, 
Persian, and Spanish of the late Mr. Fitzgerald. 
His translations, however else they may fail, make 
the same vivid impression on us that an original 
would. He has aimed at translating the genius, 
in short, letting all else take care of itself, and has 
succeeded. Chapman aimed at the same thing, 
and I think has also succeeded. You all remem- 
ber Keats 's sonnet on first looking in his Homer; 

" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken." 

Whether Homer or not, his translation is at least 
not Milton, as those in blank verse strive without 
much success to be. If the Greek original had 
been lost, and we had only Chapman, would it not 
enable us to divine some of the chief qualities of 
that original? I think it would; and I think this 
perhaps the fairest test. Commonly we open a 
translation as it were the door of a house of mourn- 
ing. It is the burial-service of our poet that is 
going on there. But Chapman's poem makes us 
feel as if Homer late in life had married an Eng- 
lish wife, and we were invited to celebrate the 
coming of age of their only son. The boy, as our 
country people say, and as Chapman would have 



CHAPMAN 99 

said, favors his mother ; there is very little Greek 
in him; and yet a trick of the gait now and then, 
and certain tones of voice, recall the father. If 
not so tall as he, and without his dignity, he is a 
fine stalwart fellow, and looks quite able to make 
his own way in the world. Yes, in Chapman's 
2)oem there is life, there is energy, and the con- 
sciousness of them. Did not Dry den say admi- 
rably well that it was such a poem as we might 
fancy Homer to have written before he arrived at 
years of discretion? Its defect is, I should say, 
that in it Homer is translated into Chapman 
rather than into English. 

Chapman is a poet for intermittent rather than 
for consecutive reading. He talks too loud and is 
too emphatic for continuous society. But when 
you leave him, you feel that you have been in the 
company of an original, and hardly know why you 
should not say a great man. From his works > 
one may infer an individuality of character in him 
such as we can attribute to scarce any other of 
his contemporaries, though originality was far 
cheaper then than now. A lofty, impetuous man, 
ready to go off without warning into what he 
called a "holy fury," but capable of inspiring an 
almost passionate liking. Had only the best parts 
of what he wrote come down to us, we should have 
reckoned him a far greater poet than we can fairly 
call him. His fragments are truly Cyclopean. 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 

The names of Beaumont and Fletcher are as 
inseparably linked together as those of Castor and 
Pollux. They are the double stars of our poetical 
firmament, and their beams are so indissolubly 
mingled that it is in vain to attempt any division 
of them that shall assign to each his rightful share. 
So long as they worked in partnership, Jasper 
Mayne says truly that they are 

" both so knit 
That no man knows where to divide their wit, 
Much less their praise." 

William Cartwright says of Fletcher : — 

" That 't was his happy fault to do too much ; 
Who therefore wisely did submit each birth 
To knowing Beaumont, ere it did come forth, 
And made him the sobriety of his wit." 

And Richard Brome also alludes to the copious 
ease of Fletcher, whom he had known : — 

" Of Fletcher and his works I speak. 
His works ! says Momus, nay, his plays you 'd say ! 
Thou hast said right, for that to him was play 
Which was to others' brains a toil." 

The general tradition seems to have been that 
Beaumont contributed the artistic judgment, and 
Fletcher the fine frenzy. There is commonly a 
grain of truth in traditions of this kind. In the 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 101 

plays written by the two poets conjointly, we may 
find an intellectual entertainment in assigning this 
passage to one and that to the other, but we can 
seldom say decisively "This is Beaumont's," or 
"That is Fletcher's," though we may find toler- 
ably convincing arguments for it. 

We have, it is true, some grounds on which we 
may safely form a conclusion as to the individual 
characteristics of Fletcher, because a majority of 
the plays which go under their joint names were 
written b}^ him alone after Beaumont's death. In 
these I find a higher and graver poetical quality, 
and I think a riper grain of sentiment, than in 
any of the others. In running my eye along the 
margin, I observe that by far the greater number 
of the isolated phrases I have marked, whether for 
poetical force or felicity, but especially for pictur- 
esqueness, and for weight of thought, belong to 
Fletcher. I should never suspect Beaumont's 
hand in such verses as these from "Bonduca" (a 
play wholly Fletcher's): — 

' ' Ten years of bitter nights and heavy marches, 

When many a frozen storm sung through my cuirass, 
And made it doubtful whether that or I 
Were the more stubborn metal." 

Where I come upon a picturesque passage in the 
joint plays, I am apt to think it Fletcher's: so too 
where there is a certain exhilaration and largeness 
of manner, and an ardor that charges its words 
with imagination as they go, or with an enthusi- 
asm that comes very near it in its effect. Take 
this from the same play : — 



102 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

" The gods of Rome fight for ye ; loud fame calls ye, 
Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blows 
To all the underworld, all nations, seas. 
And unfrequented deserts where the snow dwells, 
Wakens the ruined monuments, and there, 
Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is. 
Informs again the dead bones with your virtues." 

In short, I am inclined to think Fletcher the 
more poet of the two. Where there is pathos or 
humor, I am in doubt whether it belongs to him 
or his partner, for I find these qualities both in 
the plays they wrote together and in those which 
are wholly his. In the expression of sentiment 
going far enough to excite a painless sesthetic 
sympathy, but stopping short of tragic passion, 
Beaumont is quite the equal of his friend. In the 
art of heightening and enriching such a sentiment 
by poetical associations and pictorial accessories, 
Fletcher seems to me the superior. Both, as I 
have said, have the art of being pathetic, and of 
conceiving pathetic situations; but neither of them 
had depth enough of character for that tragic pa- 
thos which is too terrible for tears ; for those pas- 
sionate convulsions when our human nature, like 
the sea in earthquake, is sucked away deep down 
from its habitual shores, leaving bare for a mo- 
ment slimy beds stirring with loathsome life, and 
weedy tangles before undreamed of, and instantly 
hidden ao^ain under the rush of its reaction. 
Theirs are no sudden revelations, flashes oiit of the 
very tempest itseK, and born of its own collisions ; 
but much rather a melancholy Ovidian grace like 
that of the Heroic Epistles, conscious of itself, yet 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 103 

not so conscious as to beget distrust and make us 
feel as if we had been cheated of our tenderness. 
If they ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears, 
it is not without due warning and ceremonious 
preparation. I do not mean to say that their 
sentiment is not real, because it is pensive and 
not passionate. It is real, but it is never heart- 
rending. I say it all in saying that their region 
is that of fancy. Fancy and imagination may be 
of one substance, as the northern lights and light- 
ning are supposed to be; but the one plays and 
flickers in harmless flashes and streamers over 
the vault of the brain, the other condenses all its 
thought-executing fires into a single stab of flame. 
And so of their humor. It is playful, intellectual, 
elaborate, like that of Charles Lamb when he 
trifles with it, pleasing itself with artificial dislo- 
cations of thought, and never glancing at those 
essential incongruities in the nature of things at 
sight of which humor shakes its bells, and mocks 
that it may not shudder. 

Their comedies are amusing, and one of them, 
"Wit without Money," is excellent, with some 
scenes of joyous fun in it that are very cheer- 
ing. The fourth scene of the third act is a master- 
piece of fanciful extravagance. This is probably 
Fletcher's. The Rev. W. Cartwright preferred 
Fletcher's wit to Shakespeare's : — 

"Shakespeare to thee was dull : whose best jest lies 
I' th' ladies' questions and the fools' replies. 
Nature was all his art ; thy vein was free 
As his, but without his scurrility." 



104 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Posterity has taken leave to differ with the Rev. 
W. Cartwright. The conversations in Fletcher's 
comedies are often lively, but the wit is generally 
a gentlemanlike banter; that is, what was gentle- 
manlike in that day. Real wit keeps; real humor 
is of the same nature in Aristophanes and Mark 
Twain ; but nothing grows mouldy so soon as mere 
fun, the product of animal spirits. Fletcher had 
far more of this than of true humor. Both he and 
Beaumont were skilled in that pleasantry which 
in good society is the agreeable substitute for the 
more trenchant article. There is an instance of 
this in Miramont's commendation of Greek in the 
"Elder Brother:" — 

*' Though I can speak no Greek, I love the sound on't; 
It goes so thundering as it conjured devils ; 
Charles speaks it loftily, and, if thou wert a man, 
Or had'st but ever heard of Homer's Iliads, 
Hesiod and the Greek poets, thou would 'st run mad, 
And hang thyself for joy thou 'dst such a gentleman 
To be thy son. O, he has read such things 
Tome!" 

*' And do you understand 'em, brother ? " 
" I tell thee no ; that 's not material ; the sound 's 
Sufficient to confirm an honest man." 

The speech of Lucio in the "Woman-hater" 
has a smack of Moliere in it : — 

" Secretary, fetch the gown I used to read petitions in, and the 
standish I answer French letters with." 

Many of the comedies are impersonations of 
what were then called humors, like the "Little 
French Lawyer;" and some, like the "Knight of 
the Burning Pestle," mere farces. Nearly all 
have the merit of being lively and amusing, which. 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 105 

to one who has read many comedies, is saying a 
great deal. 

In what I said just now I did not mean that 
Fletcher does not sometimes show an almost tragic 
power, as he constantly does tragic sensibility. 
There are glimpses of it in "Thierry and Theodo- 
ret," and in the death-scene of the little Hengo in 
"Bonduca." Perhaps I should rather say that he 
can conceive a situation with some true elements 
of tragedy, though not of the deepest tragedy, in 
it ; but when he comes to work it out, and make it 
visible to us in words, he seems to feel himself more 
at home with the pity than the terror of it. His 
pathos (and this is true of Beaumont also) is mixed 
with a sweetness that grows cloying. And it is 
always the author who is speaking, and whom we 
hear. At best he rises only to a simulated passion, 
and that leads inevitably to declamation. There 
is no pang in it, but rather the hazy softness of re- 
membered sorrow. Lear on the heath, at parley 
with the elements, makes all our pettier griefs con- 
temptible, and the sublime pathos of that scene 
abides with us almost like a consolation. It is not 
Shakespeare who speaks, but Sorrow herself : — 

" I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness ; 
I never gave you kingdom, called you children ; 
You owe me no subscription : then let fall 
Your horrible pleasure ; here I stand, your slave, 
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis'd old man : — 
But yet I call you servile ministers, 
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd 
Your high-engender' d battles 'gainst a head 
So old and white as this." 



106 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

What confidence of simplicity is this ! "VVe call it 
Greek, but it is nature, and cosmoj)olitan as she. 
That white head and Priam's — the one feebly 
defiant, the other bent humbly over the murderous 
hand of Achilles — are our sufficing epitomes of 
desolate old age. There is no third. Generally 
pity for ourselves mingles insensibly with our pity 
for others, but here — what are we in the awful 
presence of these unexampled woes ? The sorrows 
of Beaumont and Fletcher's personages have al- 
most as much charm as sadness in them, and we 
think of the poet more than of the sufferer. Yet 
his emotion is genuine, and we feel it to be so even 
while we feel also that it leaves his mind free to 
think about it, and the dainty expression he will 
give to it. Beaumont and Fletcher appeal to this 
self-pity of which I just spoke by having the air 
of saying, "How would you feel in a situation 
like this?" I am not now speaking of their poeti- 
cal quality. That is constant and unfailing, espe- 
cially in Fletcher. In judging them as poets, the 
question would be, not what they said, but how 
they said it. 

How early the two poets came to London is 
uncertain. They had already made Ben Jonson's 
acquaintance in 1607. Their first joint play, 
"Philaster, or Love lies a-bleeding," was pro- 
duced in 1608. I suppose this play is more gen- 
erally known than any other of theirs, and the 
characteristic passages have a charm that is per- 
haps nevec found less mixed with baser matter in 
any other of the plays which make up the coUec- 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 107 

tion known as the Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
and they bear the supreme test of being read over 
again many times without loss of freshness. Phi- 
laster is son and heir to a King of Sicily, but 
robbed of his rights by the King of Calabria. 
This King has a daughter, Arethusa, secretly in 
love with Philaster, as he with her, but destined 
by her father to marry Pharamond, a Spanish 
Prince. Euphrasia, daughter of Dion, an honest 
courtier, is also in love with Philaster, and has 
entered his service disguised as a page, under the 
name of Bellario. Arethusa makes her love 
known to Philaster, who, in order that they may 
have readier means of communicating with each 
other, transfers Bellario to her. Thyra, a very 
odious lady of the court, spreads a report that 
Arethusa and her handsome page have been too 
intimate. Philaster believes this slander, and this 
leads to many complications. Arethusa dismisses 
Bellario. Philaster refuses to take him back. 
They all meet in a convenient forest, where Phi- 
laster is about to kill Arethusa at her own earnest 
entreaty, when he is prevented by a clown who is 
passing. The King, finding his daughter wounded, 
is furious, and orders instant search for the assas- 
sin. Bellario insists that he is the criminal. He 
and Philaster are put under arrest; the Princess 
asks to be their jailer. The people rise in insur- 
rection, and rescue him. It then turns out that 
he and Arethusa have been quietly married. Of 
course the play turns out with the discovery of 
Bellario 's sex and the King's consent to every- 



thing. 



108 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

I have said that it is hazardous to attempt divid- 
ing the work of Beaumont and Fletcher where they 
worked together. Both, of course, are to blame 
for what is the great blot on the play, — Philaster's 
ready belief, I might well say eager belief, in the 
guilt of the Princess. One of his speeches is posi- 
tively monstrous in infamous suggestion. Cole- 
ridge says : " Beaumont and Fletcher always write 
as if virtue or goodness were a sort of talisman or 
strange something that might be lost without the 
least fault on the part of the owner. In short, 
their chaste ladies value their chastity as a material 
thing, not as an act or state of being; and this 
mere thing being imaginary, no wonder that all 
their women are represented with the minds of 
strumpets, except a few irrational humorists. . . . 
Hence the frightful contrast between their women 
(even those who are meant to be virtuous) and 
Shakespeare's." There is some truth in this, but 
it is extravagant. Beaumont and Fletcher have 
drawn pure women. Both Bellario and Arethusa 
are so. So is Aspatia. They had coarse and even 
animal notions of women, it is true, but we must, 
in judging what they meant their women to be, 
never forget that coarseness of phrase is not always 
coarseness of thought. Women were allowed then 
to talk about things and to use words now forbid- 
den outside the slums. Decency changes its terms, 
though not its nature, from one age to another. 
This is a partial excuse for Beaumont and Fletcher, 
but they sin against that decorum of the intellect 
and conscience which is the same in all ages. In 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 109 

"Women Pleased" Claudio disguises himself, and 
makes love to his married sister Isabella in order 
to test her chastity. 

The question as to the authorship of "The Two 
Noble Kinsmen" has an interest perhaps even 
greater than that concerning the shares of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher respectively in the plays they 
wrote together, because in this case a part is at- 
tributed to Shakespeare. "The Two Noble Kins- 
men " was first published in 1634, and ascribed 
on the title-page to "the memorable worthies of 
their time, Mr. John F. and Mr. W. S." That 
Fletcher's name should have been put first is not 
surprising, if we remember his great popularity. 
He seems for a time to have been more fashionable 
than Shakespeare, especially with the young bloods 
fresh from the University and of the Inns of Court. 
They appear to have thought that he knew the 
world, in their limited understanding of the word, 
better than his great predecessor. The priority of 
name on the title-page, if not due to this, probably 
indicated that the greater part of the play wias 
from the hand of Fletcher. Opinion has been 
divided, with a leaning on the part of the weigh- 
tier judges towards giving a greater or less share 
to Shakespeare. I think the verdict must be the 
Scottish one of "not proven." On the one hand, 
the play could not have been written earlier than 
1608, and it seems extremely improbable that 
Shakespeare, then at the height of his fame, and 
in all the splendid maturity of his powers and of 
his mastery over them, should have become the 



110 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

junior partner of a younger man. Nor can lie be 
supposed to have made the work over and adapted 
it to the stage, for he appears to have abandoned 
that kind of work long before. But we cannot 
suppose the play to be so early as 1608, for the 
parts admitted on all hands to be Fletcher's are in 
his maturer manner. Yet there are some passages 
which seem to be above his reach, and might lead 
us to suppose Fletcher to have deliberately imitated 
Shakespeare's manner; but that he never does, 
though indebted to him for many suggestions. 
There is one speech in the play which is certainly 
very like Shakespeare's in the way it grows, and 
beginning with a series of noble images, deepens 
into philosophic thought at the close. And yet I 
am not altogether convinced, for Fletcher could 
heighten his style when he thought fit, and when 
the subject fully inspired him. 

Beaumont and Fletcher undoubtedly owed a 
part of their immediate renown to the fact that 
they were looked upon as gentlemen and scholars. 
Not that they put on airs of gentility, as their 
disciple Ford was fond of doing a little later, and 
as Horace Walpole, Byron, and even Landor did. 
They frankly gave their address in Grub Street, 
so far as we know. But they certainly seem to 
have been set up, as being artists and men of the 
world, not perhaps as rivals of Shakespeare, but 
in favorable comparison with one who was sup- 
posed to owe everything to nature. I believe that 
Pope, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, 
was the first to express doubts about the wisdom 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 111 

of accepting too literally what Ben Jonson says of 
his "little Latin and less Greek." However that 
may be, and I am inclined to think Shakespeare 
had more learning even, not to say knowledge, 
than is commonly allowed him, it is singular that 
the man whose works show him to have meditated 
deeply on whatever interests human thought, should 
have been supposed never to have given his mind 
to the processes of his own craft. But this com- 
parison of him with Beaumont and Fletcher sug- 
gests one remark of some interest, namely, that 
not only are his works by far more cleanly in 
thought and phrase than those of any of his im- 
portant contemporaries, except Marlowe, not only 
are his men more manly and his women more wo- 
manly than theirs, but that his types also of gen- 
tlemen and ladies are altogether beyond any they 
seem to have been capable of conceiving. 

Of the later dramatists, I think Beaumont and 
Fletcher rank next to Shakespeare in the amount 
of pleasure they give, though not in the quality of 
it, and in fanciful charm of expression. In spite 
of all their coarseness, there is a delicacy, a sen- 
sibility, an air of romance, and above all a grace, 
in their best work that make them forever attrac- 
tive to the young, and to all those who have 
learned to grow old amiably. Imagination, as 
Shakespeare teaches us to know it, we can hardly 
allow them, but they are the absolute lords of 
some of the fairest provinces in the domain of 
fancy. Their poetry is genuine, spontaneous, and 
at first hand. As I turn over the leaves of an 



112 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

edition which I read forty-five years ago, and see, 
by the passages underscored, how much I enjoyed, 
and remember with whom, so many happy memo- 
ries revive, so many vanished faces lean over the 
volume with me, that I am prone to suspect my- 
self of yielding to an enchantment that is not in 
the book itself. But no, I read Beaumont and 
Fletcher through again last autumn, and the eleven 
volumes of Dyce's edition show even more pencil 
marks than the two of Darley had gathered in re- 
peated readings. The delight they give, the gay- 
ety they inspire, are all their own. Perhaps one 
cause of this is their lavishness, their lightsome 
ease, their happy confidence in resources that 
never failed them. Their minds work without 
that reluctant break which pains us in most of the 
later dramatists. They had that pleasure in writ- 
ing which gives pleasure in reading, and deserve 
our gratitude because they promote cheerfulness, 
or, even when gravest, a pensive melancholy that, 
if it does not play with sadness, never takes it too 
seriously. 



VI 

MASSINGER AND FOED 

Philip Massinger was born in 1584, the son 
of Arthur Massinger, a gentleman who held some 
position of trust in the household of Henry, Earl 
of Pembroke, who married the sister of Sir Philip 
Sidney. It was for her that the "Arcadia" was 
written. And for her Ben Jonson wrote the fa- 
mous epitaph : — 

" Underneath this sable hearse 
Lies the subject of all verse. 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. 
Death ! ere thou hast slain another, 
Learn'd and fair and good as she, 
Time shall throw a dart at thee." 

It would be pleasant to think that Massinger 's 
boyhood had been spent in the pure atmosphere 
that would have surrounded such a woman, but it 
should seem that he could not have been brought 
up in her household. Otherwise it is hard to un- 
derstand why, in dedicating his "Bondman" to 
Philip, Earl of Montgomery, one of her sons, he 
should say, "However, I could never arrive at the 
happiness to be made known to your lordship, yet 
a desire, born with me, to make a tender of all 
duties and service to the noble family of the Her- 
berts descended to me as an inheritance from my 
dead father, Arthur Massinger," All that we 



114 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

know of his early life is that he entered a com- 
moner at St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, in 1602. At 
the University he remained four years, but left 
it without taking a degree. 

From the year 1606, until his name appears in 
an undated document which the late Mr. John 
Payne Collier decides to be not later than 1614, we 
know nothing of him. , This document is so illus- 
trative of the haphazard lives of most of the dra- 
matists and actors of the time as to be worth read- 
ing. It was written by Nathaniel Field, the actor 
who played the part of Bussy d'Ambois in Chap- 
man's play of that name, and who afterwards be- 
came prosperous and one of the shareholders in the 
Globe Theatre. Here it is : — 

" To our most loving friend, Mr. Philip Hinchlow, 
Esq., These: 

" Mr. Hinchlow, — You understand our unfortu- 
nate extremity, and I do not think you so void of 
Christianity, but you would throw so much money into 
the Thames as we request now of you rather than en- 
danger so many innocent lives. You know there is XZ. 
more at least to be received of you for the play. We de- 
sire you to lend us V/. of that, which shall be allowed to 
you, without which we cannot be bailed, nor I play any 
more till this be despatched. It will lose you XXZ. ere 
the end of the next week, besides the hindrance of the 
next new play. Pray, sir, consider our cases with hu- 
manity, and now give us cause to acknowledge you our 
true friend in time of need. We have entreated Mr. 
Davison to deliver this note, as well to witness your love 
as our promises and always acknowledgment to be your 
most thankful and loving friend, Nat Field." 



MASSINGER AND FORD 115 

Under this is written : — 

" The money shall be abated out of the money [that] 
remains for the play of Mr. Fletcher and ours. 

Rob Daborne." 

" I have always found you a true loving friend to me, 
and, in so small a suit, it being honest, I hope you will 
not fail us. Philip Massinger." 

The endorsement on this appeal shows that Hinch- 
low sent the money. No doubt Field was selected 
to write it as the person most necessary to Hinch- 
low, who could much more easily get along with- 
out a new play than without a popular actor. It 
is plain from the document itself that the signers 
of it were all under arrest, probably for some tav- 
ern bill, or it would not otherwise be easy to ac- 
count for their being involved in a common calam- 
ity. Davison was doubtless released as being the 
least valuable. It is amusing to see how Hinch- 
low's humanity and Christianity are briefly ap- 
pealed to first as a matter of courtesy, and how 
the real arguments are addressed to his self-inter- 
est as more likely to prevail. Massinger's words 
are of some value as showing that he had probably 
for some time been connected with the stage. 

There are two other allusions to Massinger in 
the registers of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the 
Eevels. Both are to plays of his now lost. Of 
one of them even the name has not survived. On 
the 11th of January, 1631, Sir Henry refused to 
license this nameless performance "because it did 
contain dangerous matter — as the deposing of 



116 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Sebastian King of Portugal by Philip II., there 
being peace sworn beween England and Spain." 
He adds, amusingly enough, ''I had my fee not- 
withstanding, which belongs to me for reading it 
over, and ought always to be brought with a book." 
Again, in 1638, at the time of the dispute between 
Charles I. and his subjects about ship-money. Sir 
Henry quotes from a manuscript play of Massinger 
submitted to him for censure the following pas- 
sage : — 

" Monies ? We '11 raise supplies which way we please, 
And force you to subscribe to blanks in which 
We '11 mulct you as we shall think fit. The Caesars 
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws 
But what their swords did ratify, the wives 
And daughters of the senators bowing to 
Their wills as deities," etc. 

Sir Henry then adds, "This is a piece taken out 
of Philip Massinger 's play called 'The King and 
the Subject,' and entered here forever to be re- 
membered by my son and those that cast their eyes 
upon it, in honor of King Charles, my master, 
who, reading the play over at Newmarket, set his 
mark upon the place with his own hand and in 
these words: 'This is too insolent, and to be 
changed.' Note that the poet makes it the speech 
of Don Pedro, King of Spain, and spoken to his 
subjects." Coleridge rather hastily calls Massin- 
srer a democrat. But I find no evidence of it in 
his plays. He certainly was no advocate of the 
slavish doctrine of passive obedience, or of what 
Pope calls the right divine of kings to govern 
wrong, as Beaumont and Fletcher often were, but 



MASSINGER AND FORD 117 

he could not have been a democrat without being 
an anachronism, and that no man can be. 

The license of the stage at that time went much 
farther than this; nay, it was as great as it ever 
was at Athens. From a letter of the Privy Coun- 
cil to certain justices of the peace of the County of 
Middlesex in 1601, we learn that "certain players 
who use to recite their plays at the Curtain in 
Moorfields do represent upon the stage in their 
interludes the persons of some gentlemen of good 
desert and quality, that are yet alive, under ob- 
scure manner, but yet in such sort as all the hear- 
ers may take notice both of the matter and the 
persons that are meant thereby." And again it 
appears that in 1605 the Corporation of the City 
of London memorialized the Privy Council, in- 
forming them that "Kemp Armyn and other play- 
ers at the Black Friars have again not forborne to 
bring upon their stage one or more of the Worship- 
ful Company of Aldermen, to their great scandal 
and the lessening of their authority," and praying 
that "order may be taken to remedy the abuse, 
either by putting down or removing the said 
Theatre." Aristophanes brought Socrates and 
Euripides upon the stage, — but neither of these 
was an Alderman. 

Massinger committed no offences of this kind, 
unless Sir Giles Overreach be meant for some spe- 
cial usurer whom he wished to make hateful, of 
which there is no evidence. He does indeed ex- 
press his own opinions, his likes and dislikes, very 
freely. Nor were these such as he need be 



118 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

ashamed to avow. It may be inferred, on the 
strength of some of the sentiments put by him into 
the mouths of his characters, that he would have 
sympathized rather with Hampden and Pym than 
with Charles I. But nothing more than this can 
be conjectured as to his probable politics. He 
disliked cruel creditors, grinders of the poor, en- 
closers of commons, and forestallers, as they were 
called; for corners in wheat and other commodi- 
ties were not unknown to our ancestors, nor did 
they think better of the men that made them than 
we. There is a curious passage in his play of 
"The Guardian" which shows that his way of 
thinking on some points was not unlike Mr. Rus- 
kin's. Severino, who has been outlawed, draws up 
a code of laws for the banditti of whom he has 
become captain, defining who might be properly 
plundered and who not. Among those belonging 
to the former class he places the 

" Builders of iron-mills that grub up forests 
With timber trees for shipping ; " 

and in the latter, scholars, soldiers, rack-rented 
farmers, needy market folks, sweaty laborers, car- 
riers, and women. All that we can fairly say is 
that he was a man of large and humane sympa- 
thies. 

But though Massinger did not, so far as we 
know, indulge in as great licenses of scenic satire 
as some of his contemporaries, there is in his 
"Roman Actor" so spirited a defence of the free- 
dom of the stage and of its usefulness as a guar- 



MASSINGER AND FORD 119 

dian and reformer of morals that I will quote 
it: — 

" Aretinus. Are you on the stage, 

You talk so boldly ? 

Paris. The whole world being one, 

This place is not exempted ; and I am 
So confident in the justice of our cause 
That I could wish Caesar, in whose great name 
All kings are comprehended, sat as judge 
To hear our plea, and then determine of us. 
If, to express a man sold to his lusts. 
Wasting the treasure of his time and fortunes 
In wanton dalliance, and to what sad end 
A wretch that 's so given over does arrive at ; 
Deterring careless youth, by his example. 
From such licentious courses ; laying open 
The snares of bawds, and the consuming arts 
Of prodigal strumpets, can deserve reproof, 
Why are not all your golden principles. 
Writ down by grave philosophers to instruct us 
To choose fair virtue for our guide, not pleasure. 
Condemned unto the fire ? 

Sura. There 's spirit in this. 

Paris. Or if desire of honor was the base 
On which the building of the Roman Empire 
Was raised up to this height ; if, to inflame 
The noble youth with an ambitious heat 
T' endure the frosts of danger, nay, of death. 
To be thought worthy the triumphal wreath 
By glorious undertakings, may deserve 
Reward or favor from the commonwealth, 
Actors may put in for as large a share 
As all the sects of the philosophers. 
They with cold precepts (perhaps seldom read) 
Deliver what an honorable thing 
The active virtue is ; but does that fire 
The blood, or swell the veins with emulation 
To be both good and great, equal to that 
Which is presented on our theatres ? 
Let a good actor, in a lofty scene, 
Shew great Alcides honour' d in the sweat 



120 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Of his twelve laboiirs ; or a bold Camillus 
Forbidding Rome to be redeem' d with gold 
From the insulting Gauls ; or Scipio, 
After his victories, imposing tribute 
On conquer'd Carthage ; if done to the life, 
As if they saw their dangers, and their glories, 
And did partake with them in their rewards, 
All that have any spark of Roman in them, 
The slothful arts laid by, contend to be 
Like those they see presented. 

Rusticus. He has put 

The consuls to their whisper. 

Paris. But 't is urged 

That we corrupt youth, and traduce superiors. 
When do we bring a vice upon the stage 
That does go off unpunish'd ? Do we teach. 
By the success of wicked undertakings. 
Others to tread in their forbidden steps ? 
We shew no arts of Lydian panderism, 
Corinthian poisons, Persian flatteries. 
But mulcted so in the conclusion, that 
Even those spectators that were so inclined. 
Go home changed men. And, for traducing such 
That are above us, publishing to the world 
Their secret crimes, we are as innocent 
As such as are born dumb. When we present 
An heir that does conspire against the life 
Of his dear parent, numbering every hour 
He lives as tedious to him, if there be 
Among the auditors one whose conscience tells him 
He is of the same mould, — we cannot help it. 
Or, bringing on the stage a loose adulteress, 
That does maintain the riotous expense 
Of him that feeds her greedy lust, yet suffers 
The lawful pledges of a former bed 
To starve the while for hunger ; if a matron. 
However great in fortune, birth, or titles. 
Guilty of such a foul, unnatural sin, 
Cry out, 'T is writ for me, — WE CANNOT help it. 
Or, when a covetous man 's express' d, whose wealth 
Arithmetic cannot number, and whose lordships 



MASSINGER AND FORD 121 

A falcon in one day cannot fly over, 

Yet he so sordid in his mind, so griping, 

As not to afford himself the necessaries 

To maintain life ; if a patrician 

(Though honour'd with a consulship) find himself 

Touch'd to the quick in this, — WE CANNOT HELP it. 

Or, when we show a judge that is corrupt. 

And will give up his sentence as he favours 

The person, not the cause, saving the guilty, 

If of his faction, and as oft condemning 

The innocent, out of particular spleen ; 

If any in this reverend assembly, 

Nay, even yourself, my lord, that are the image 

Of absent Csesar, feel something in your bosom 

That puts you in remembrance of things past, 

Or things intended, — 't is NOT in us to help it. 

I have said, my lord : and now, as you find cause. 

Or censure us, or free us with applause." 

We know nothing else of Massinger's personal 
history beyond what has been told, except that the 
parish register of St. Saviour's contains this en- 
try: "March 20, 1639-40, buried Philip Massin- 
ger, a stranger." A pathos has been felt by some 
in the words "a stranger," as if they implied pov- 
erty and desertion. But they merely meant that 
Massinger did not belong to that parish. John 
Aubrey is spoken of in the same way in the regis- 
ter of St. Mary Magdalen at Oxford, and for the 
same reason. 

Massinger wrote thirty-seven plays, of which 
only eighteen have come down to us. The name 
of one of these non-extant plays, "The Noble 
Choice," gives a keen pang to a lover of the poet, 
for it seems to indicate a subject peculiarly fitted 
to bring out his best qualities as a dramatist. 



122 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Four of the lost plays were used to kindle fires 
by that servant of Mr. Warburton who made such 
tragic havoc in our earlier dramatic literature, a 
vulgar Omar without the pious motive of the Com- 
mander of the Faithful, if, as is very doubtful, he 
did indeed order the burning of the Alexandrian 
Library. 

To me Massinger is one of the most interesting 
as well as one of the most delightful of the old 
dramatists, not so much for his passion or power, 
though at times he reaches both, as for the love he 
shows for those things that are lovely and of good 
report in human nature, for his sympathy with 
what is generous and high-minded and honorable, 
and for his equable flow of a good every-day kind 
of poetry with few rapids or cataracts, but sin- 
gularly soothing and companionable. The Latin 
adjective for gentleman, ge?ierosus^ fits him aptly. 
His plots are generally excellent ; his versification 
masterly, with skilful breaks and pauses, capable 
of every needful variety of emotion ; and his dia- 
logue easy, natural, and sprightly, subsiding in 
the proper places to a refreshing conversational 
tone. This graceful art was one seldom learned 
by any of those who may be fairly put in compari- 
son with him. Even when it has put on the sock, 
their blank verse cannot forget the stride and strut 
it had caught of the cothurnus. Massinger never 
mouths or rants, because he seems never to have 
written merely to fill up an empty space. He is 
therefore never bombastic, for bombast gets its 
metaphorical name from its original physical use 



MASSINGER AND FORD 123 

as padding. Indeed, there are very few empty 
spaces in his works. His plays are interesting 
alike from their story and the way it is told. I 
doubt if there are so many salient short passages, 
striking images, or pregnant sayings to be found 
in his works as may be found in those of very in- 
ferior men. But we feel always that we are in 
the company of a serious and thoughtful man, if 
not in that of a great thinker. Great thinkers, 
indeed, are seldom so entertaining as he. If he 
does not tax the mind of his reader, nor call out all 
its forces with profound problems of psychology, 
he is infinitely suggestive of not unprofitable re- 
flection, and of agreeable nor altogether purpose- 
less meditation. His is "a world whose course 
is equable," where "calm pleasures abide," if no 
"majestic pains." I never could understand 
Lamb's putting Middleton and Rowley above him, 
unless, perhaps, because he was less at home on 
the humbler levels of humanity, less genial than 
they, or, at least, than Rowley. But there were 
no proper aesthetic grounds of comparison, if I am 
right in thinking, as I do, that he differed from 
them in kind, and that his kind was the higher. 

In quoting from Wordsworth's "Laodamia" 
just now, I stopped short of the word "pure," and 
said only that Massinger's world was "equable." 
I did this because in some of his lower characters 
there is a coarseness, nay, a foulness, of thought 
and sometimes of phrase for which I find it hard 
to account. There is nothing in it that could pos- 
sibly corrupt the imagination, for it is altogether 



124 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

repulsive. In this case, as in Chapman's, I should 
say that it indicated more ignorance of what is de- 
basingly called Life than knowledge of it. With 
all this he gives frequent evidence of a higher con- 
ception of love than was then common. The re- 
gion in which his mind seems most naturally to 
dwell is one of honor, courage, devotion, and ethe- 
real sentiment. 

I cannot help asking myself, did such a world 
ever exist? Perhaps not; yet one is inclined to 
say that it is such a world as might exist, and, if 
possible, ought to exist. It is a world of noble 
purpose not always inadequately fulfilled; .a world 
whose terms are easily accepted by the intellect as 
well as by the imagination. By this I mean that 
there is nothing violently improbable in it. Some 
men, and, I believe, more women, live habitually 
in such a world when they commune with their own 
minds. It is a world which we visit in thought 
as we go abroad to renew and invigorate the ideal 
part of us. The canopy of its heaven is wide 
enough to stretch over Boston also. I heard, the 
other day, the story of a Boston merchant which 
convinces me of it. The late Mr. Samuel Apple- 
ton was anxious about a ship of his which was 
overdue, and was not insured. Every day added 
to his anxiety, till at last he began to be more 
troubled about that than about his ship. "Is it 
possible," he said to himself, "that I am getting 
to love money for itself, and not for its noble 
uses?" He added together the value of the ship 
and the estimated profit on her cargo, found it to 



MASSINGER AND FORD 125 

be $40,000, and at once devoted that amount to 
charities in which he was interested. This kind 
of thing may happen, and sometimes does happen, 
in the actual world; it always happens in the 
world where Massinger lays his scene. That is 
the difference, and it is by reason of this differ- 
ence that I like to be there. I move more freely 
and breathe more inspiring air among those en- 
couraging possibilities. As I just said, we find no 
difficulty in reconciling ourselves with its condi- 
tions. We find no difficulty even where there is 
an absolute disengagement from all responsibility 
to the matter-of-fact, as in the "Arabian Nights," 
which I read through again a few years ago with 
as much pleasure as when a boy, perhaps with 
more. For it appears to me that it is the business 
of all imaginative literature to offer us a sanctuary 
from the world of the newspapers, in which we 
have to live, whether we will or no. As in look- 
ing at a picture we must place ourselves at the 
proper distance to harmonize all its particulars into 
an effective whole, I am not sure that life is not 
seen in a truer perspective when it is seen in the 
fairer prospect of an ideal remoteness. Perhaps 
we must always go a little way back in order to 
get into the land of romance, as Scott and Haw- 
thorne did. And yet it is within us too. An un- 
skilful story-teller always raises our suspicion by 
putting a foot-note to any improbable occurrence, 
to say "This is a fact," and the so-called realist 
raises doubts in my mind when he assures me that 
he, and he alone, gives me the facts of life. Too 



126 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

often all I can say is, if these are the facts, I don't 
want them. The police reports give me more than 
I care for every day. But are they the facts ? I 
had much rather believe them to be the accidental 
and transitory phenomena of our existence here. 
The real and abiding facts are those that are rec- 
ognized as such by the soul when it is in that upper 
chamber of our being which is farthest removed 
from the senses, and commerces with its truer self. 
I very much prefer "King Lear " to Balzac's bour- 
geois version of it in "Le Pere Goriot," as I do 
the ndivete of Miranda to that of Voltaire's In- 
genu, and, when I look about me in the Fortunate 
Islands of the poet, would fain exclaim with her : 

*' ! wonder! 
How many goodly creatures are there here ! 
How beauteous mankind is ! 0, brave new world, 
That has such people in 't ! " 

Those old poets had a very lordly contempt for 
probability when improbability would serve their 
purpose better. But Massinger taxes our credulity 
less than most of them, for his improbabilities are 
never moral; that is, are never impossibilities. I 
do not recall any of those sudden conversions in 
his works from baseness to loftiness of mind, and 
from vice to virtue, which trip up all our expecta- 
tions so startlingly in many an old play. As to 
what may be called material improbabilities, we 
should remember that two hundred and fifty years 
ago many things were possible, with great advan- 
tage to complication of plot, which are no longer 
so. The hand of an absolute prince could give 



MASSINGER AND FORD 127 

a very sudden impulse to the wheel of Fortune, 
whether to lift a minion from the dust or hurl him 
back again; men might be taken by Barbary cor- 
sairs and sold for slaves, or turn Turks, as occa- 
sion required. The world was fuller of chances 
and changes than now, and the boundaries of the 
possible, if not of the probable, far wider. Mas- 
singer was discreet in the use of these privileges, 
and does not abuse them, as his contemporaries 
and predecessors so often do. His is a possible 
world, though it be in some ways the best of all 
possible worlds. He puts no strain upon our im- 
aginations. 

As a poet he is inferior to many others, and 
this follows inevitably from the admission we feel 
bound to make that good sense and good feeling 
are his leading qualities — yet ready to forget their 
sobriety in the exhilaration of romantic feeling. 
When Nature makes a poet, she seems willing to 
sacrifice all other considerations. Yet this very 
good sense of Massinger's has made him excel- 
lent as a dramatist. His "New Way to pay Old 
Debts" is a very effective play, though in the 
reading far less interesting and pleasing than most 
of the others. Yet there are power and passion in 
it, even if the power be somewhat melodramatic, 
and the passion of an ignoble type. In one re- 
spect he was truly a poet — his conceptions of 
character were ideal ; but his diction, though full 
of dignity and never commonplace, lacks the 
charm of the inspired and inspiring word, the re- 
lief of the picturesque image that comes so natu- 



128 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

rally to the help of Fletcher. Where he is most 
fanciful, indeed, the influence of Fletcher is only 
too apparent both in his thought and diction. I 
should praise him chiefly for the atmosphere of 
magnanimity which invests his finer scenes, and 
which it is wholesome to breathe. In Massinger's 
plays people behave generously, as if that were the 
natural thing to do, and give us a comfortable 
feeling that the world is not so bad a place, after 
all, and that perhaps Schopenhauer was right in 
enduring for seventy -two years a life that was n't 
worth living. He impresses one as a manly kind 
of person, and the amount of man in a poet, 
though it may not add to his purely poetical qual- 
ity, adds much, I think, to our pleasure in read- 
ing his works. 

I have left myseK little space in which to speak 
of Ford, but it will suffice. In reading him again 
after a long interval, with elements of wider com- 
parison, and provided with more trustworthy tests, 
I find that the greater part of what I once took on 
trust as precious is really paste and pinchbeck. 
His plays seem to me now to be chiefly remark- 
able for that filigree -work of sentiment which we 
call sentimentality. The word "alchemy" once 
had a double meaning. It was used to signify both 
the process by which lead could be transmuted 
into gold, and the alloy of baser metal by which 
gold could be adulterated without losing so much 
of its specious semblance as to be readily detected. 
The ring of the true metal can be partially imi- 



MASSINGER AND FORD 129 

tated, and for a while its glow, but the counterfeit 
grows duller as the genuine grows brighter with 
wear. The greater poets have found out the 
ennobling secret, the lesser ones the trick of falsi- 
fication. Ford seems to me to have been a master 
in it. He abounds especially in mock pathos. I 
remember when he thoroughly imposed on me. A 
youth, unacquainted with grief and its incommu- 
nicable reserve, sees nothing unnatural or indecent 
in those expansive sorrows precious only because 
they can be confided to the first comer, and finds a 
pleasing titillation in the fresh-water tears with 
which they cool his eyelids. But having once 
come to know the jealous secretiveness of real sor- 
row, we resent these conspiracies to waylay our sym- 
pathy, — conspiracies of the opera plotted at the 
top of the lungs. It is joy tha is wont to over- 
flow, but grief shrinks back to its sources. I sus- 
pect the anguish that confides its loss to the town- 
crier. Even in that single play of Ford's which 
comes nearest to the true pathetic, "The Broken 
Heart," there is too much apparent artifice, and 
Charles Lamb's comment on its closing scene is 
worth more than all Ford ever wrote. But a critic 
must look at it minus Charles Lamb. We may 
read as much of ourselves into a great poet as we 
will; we shall never cancel our debt to him. In 
the interests of true literature we should not honor 
fraudulent drafts upon our imagination. 

Ford has an air of saying something without 
ever saying it that is peculiarly distressing to a 
man who values his time. His diction is hack- 



130 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

iieyed and commonplace, and lias seldom the charm 
of unexpected felicity, so much a matter of course 
with the elder poets. Especially does his want 
of imagination show itself in his metaphors. The 
strong direct thrust of phrase which we cannot 
parry, sometimes because of very artlessness, is 
never his. 

Compare, for example, this passage with one of 
similar content from Shakespeare : — 

" Keep in, 
Bright angel, that severer breath to cool 
The heat of cruelty which sways the temple 
Of your too stony breast ; you cannot urge 
One reason to rebuke my trembling plea 
Which I have not, with many nights' expense, 
Examined ; but, oh Madam, still I find 
No physic strong to cure a tortured mind 
But freedom from the torture it sustains." 

Now hear Shakespeare : — 

" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain, 
And, with some sweet oblivious antidote. 
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of the perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart ? " 

Ford lingers -out his heart-breaks too much. Ho 
recalls to my mind a speech of Calianax in Beau- 
mont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy:" "You 
have all fine new tricks to grieve. But I ne'er 
knew any but direct crying." One is tempted to 
prefer the peremptory way in which the old ballad- 
mongers dealt with such matters : — 

"She turned her face unto the wa', 
And there her very heart it brak." 



MASSINGER AND FORD 131 

I cannot bid you farewell without thanking you 
for the patience with which you have followed me 
to the end. I may have seemed sometimes to be 
talking to you of things that would weigh but as 
thistle-down in the great business-scales of life. 
But I have an old x)pinion, strengthening with 
years, that it is as important to keep the soul alive 
as the body; nay, that it is the life of the soul 
which gives all its value to that of the body. 
Poetry is a criticism of life only in the sense that 
it furnishes us with the standard of a more ideal 
felicity, of calmer pleasures and more majestic 
pains. I am glad to see that what the under- 
standing would stigmatize as useless is coming back 
into books written for children, which at one time 
threatened to become more and more drearily prac- 
tical and didactic. The fairies are permitted once 
more to imprint their rings on the tender sward of 
the child's fancy, and it is the child's fancy that 
often lives obscurely on to minister solace to the 
lonelier and less sociable mind of the man. Our 
nature resents the closing up of the windows on its 
emotional and imaginative side, and revenges itself 
as it can. I have observed that many who deny 
the inspiration of Scripture hasten to redress their 
balance by giving a reverent credit to the revela- 
tions of inspired tables and camp-stools. In a last 
analysis it may be said that it is to the sense of 
Wonder that all literature of the Fancy and of the 
Imagination appeals. I am told that this sense is 
the survival in us of some savage ancestor of the 



132 THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

age of flint. If so, I am thankful to him for his 
longevity, or his transmitted nature, whichever it 
may be. But I have my own suspicion sometimes 
that the true age of flint is before, and not behind 
us, an age hardening itself more and more to those 
subtle influences which ransom our lives from the 
captivity of the actual, from that dungeon whose 
warder is the Giant Despair. Yet I am consoled 
by thinking that the siege of Troy will be remem- 
bered when those of Vicksburg and Paris are for- 
gotten. One of the old dramatists, Thomas Hey- 
wood, has, without meaning it, set down for us the 
uses of the poets : — 

" They cover us with counsel to defend us 
From storms without ; they polish us within 
With learning', knowledge, arts, and disciplines ; 
All that is nought and vicious they sweep from us 
Like dust and cobwebs ; our rooms concealed 
Hang with the costliest hangings 'bout the walls, 
Emblems and beauteous symbols pictured round." 



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